101 Dalmatians: a multimodal naturalistic fMRI dataset in typical development and congenital sensory loss

In recent years, neuroscience has increasingly leveraged naturalistic stimuli, like movies and narratives, to investigate cognitive processes underlying real-world human behavior. Here, we present a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) dataset featuring 50 participants, with and without congenital sensory loss (typical development, congenitally blind and deaf individuals), who were exposed to audiovisual, auditory, or visual versions of the live-action movie 101 Dalmatians. The dataset incorporates auditory and visual descriptors from established computational models (e.g., VGGish, VGG-19) and semantic embeddings generated by GPT-4, complemented by human-tagged annotations of movie events and content. All data are provided in a standardized BIDS format. fMRI data quality was evaluated through Inter-Subject Correlation (ISC), ensuring robust comparisons across participants and groups. The 101 Dalmatians dataset facilitates the exploration of the effects of congenital sensory deprivation on brain functional organization, neuroplasticity, and the interplay between sensory inputs and cognitive processes. It is a valuable resource for understanding how sensory experiences —or their absence— shape human brain development and functional adaptation.