Naturalistic movie-fMRI provides a shared, temporally structured probe of brain dynamics, yet predictive models commonly rely on whole-run functional connectivity (FC) or temporally generic representations that are not aligned with narrative events.
We introduce MovieSTAGE (Scene, Transition, and Global Encoding), a multiscale framework that combines hypergraph-structured FC-profile organization within scenes, unsigned FC-profile differences across adjacent scenes, and whole-movie FC.
We evaluated 260 participants from the CMI-HBN Despicable Me cohort on case-control, ADHD-subtype, and three-class classification using 10 repetitions of stratified five-fold cross-validation, complete out-of-fold (OOF) predictions, and paired subject-cluster bootstrap and permutation tests.
MovieSTAGE achieved AUROCs of 0.69, 0.73, and 0.75 and balanced accuracies of 67.6%, 69.8%, and 58.3%, respectively, yielding the highest mean point estimates among the evaluated methods.
On the three-class task, the full model outperformed all two-branch variants, the HGNN scene encoder outperformed MLP, GAT, and BNT alternatives under matched settings, and the human-annotated partition outperformed duration-matched random and fixed-count GSBS controls.
These controlled results support incremental predictive value from event-aligned scene and transition representations when combined with whole-movie FC in this cohort.
Post-hoc model-derived analyses generated network-level hypotheses involving frontoparietal and default-mode systems.