Neuroscout: a web-based platform for flexible re-analysis of naturalistic fMRI datasets

fMRI studies using complex naturalistic stimulation, such as movies or audio narratives, hold great promise to reveal the neural activity underlying dynamic perception. However, this potential is limited by the resource-intensive nature of fMRI analysis, and the difficulty of annotating events in rich, multi-modal stimuli. Consequently, only a small fraction of viable hypotheses are ever tested, even as the number of public datasets increases. Here we present Neuroscout, a platform that harnesses automated feature extraction tools and a web-based analysis builder to enable researchers to flexibly define and test novel statistical models in public fMRI datasets.