A high-density diffuse optical tomography dataset of naturalistic viewing

Traditional laboratory tasks offer tight experimental control but lack the richness of our everyday human experience. As a result many cognitive neuroscientists have been motivated to adopt experimental paradigms that are more natural, such as stories and movies. Here we describe data collected from 58 healthy adult participants (aged 18–76 years) who viewed 10 minutes of a movie (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966). Most (36) participants viewed the clip more than once, resulting in 106 sessions of data. Cortical responses were mapped using high-density diffuse optical tomography (first-through fourth nearest neighbor separations of 1.3, 3.0, 3.9, and 4.7 cm), covering large portions of superficial occipital, temporal, parietal, and frontal lobes. Consistency of measured activity across subjects was quantified using intersubject correlation analysis. Data are provided in both channel format (SNIRF) and projected to standard space (NIfTI), using an atlas-based light model. These data are suitable for methods exploration as well as investigating a wide variety of cognitive phenomena.