Brain data of language processing available to everyone

03 April 2019
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Brain researchers have provided access to a collection of brain data of more than 200 test subjects, who were processing language during measurements. The high-quality data set has been collected and by a team of researchers from the Donders Institute and the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen. Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen, Robert Oostenveld and colleagues describe these data today in Scientific Data.

The 204 participants performed a language task in an MRI scanner and an MEG device, and underwent a so-called resting-state scan in both devices. Combining these techniques allows for a detailed assessment of where (MRI) and when (MEG) the different parts of the brain are processing language. In addition, structural information about brain anatomy and cortical connections was collected with MRI.

The researchers have themselves already used the data for various recent publications. Now the entire set has been made available to other researchers. They can use this for their own research.

This dataset is unique in its kind because of the large number of participants, and because several types of neuroimaging data have been measured in all of the test subjects. This offers possibilities to link different types of data to each other in relation to language processing, thus allowing us to advance our understanding of how the brain makes sense of language, and how this may vary across individuals.

 

Publication

Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen, Robert Oostenveld, e.a., A 204-subject multimodel neuroimaging dataset to study language processing, Scientific Data, February 2019 Link to paper

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