Probing Multimodal Fusion in the Brain: The Dominance of Audiovisual Streams in Naturalistic Encoding

Predicting brain activity in response to naturalistic, multimodal stimuli is a key challenge in computational neuroscience. While encoding models are becoming more powerful, their ability to generalize to truly novel contexts remains a critical, often untested, question. In this work, we developed brain encoding models using state-of-the-art visual (X-CLIP) and auditory (Whisper) feature extractors and rigorously evaluated them on both in-distribution (ID) and diverse out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Our results reveal a fundamental trade-off between model complexity and generalization: a higher-capacity attention-based model excelled on ID data, but a simpler linear model was more robust, outperforming a competitive baseline by 18% on the OOD set. Intriguingly, we found that linguistic features did not improve predictive accuracy, suggesting that for familiar languages, neural encoding may be dominated by the continuous visual and auditory streams over redundant textual information. Spatially, our approach showed marked performance gains in the auditory cortex, underscoring the benefit of high-fidelity speech representations. Collectively, our findings demonstrate that rigorous OOD testing is essential for building robust neuro-AI models and provides nuanced insights into how model architecture, stimulus characteristics, and sensory hierarchies shape the neural encoding of our rich, multimodal world.