Abstract
We present a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) dataset collected as part of an adversarial collaboration aimed at arbitrating between the Global Neuronal Workspace theory (GNWT) and the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness. Participants (N = 118) were presented with suprathreshold visual stimuli belonging to four different categories (faces, objects, letters, false fonts) with three orientations (front, left, right view), and three durations (0.5, 1.0, 1.5 seconds). Participants were asked to identify infrequent targets that changed in each block, thereby rendering two categories task-relevant and two task-irrelevant. The simplicity of the experimental design and of the task given to the participants ensures that these data are broadly reusable. Besides testing predictions from other theories of consciousness, these data can be used to examine various aspects of visual processing. The anonymized data were converted to Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS), and can be easily accessed through a web platform or an API. The dataset contains quality reports, demographics, behavioral performance, and eye-tracking data. We also provide code for preprocessing and analyzing the data.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Monique Smulders, Sarah Kusch, Abdo Sharaf, and Matthew Yuen for help with MRI data acquisition. This work was supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF0389–1872 DOI.ORG/10.54224/20389; TWCF0486 - DOI.ORG/10.54224/20486), and the Max Planck Society.
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Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
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Khalaf, A., Richter, D., Vidal, Y. et al. An open-access multi-site fMRI dataset for investigating conscious visual perception. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07377-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07377-y
