A human EEG dataset to study cognitive flexibility during auditory discrimination under real-world distractors

Abstract Salient sounds in the environment automatically capture our attention, causing a shift of focus away from ongoing goal-directed tasks. Studies of cognitive flexibility can employ such paradigms to examine how the brain reorients attention to the ongoing goal, an ability notably impaired in neurodevelopmental and clinical populations. The current dataset captures attentional reorientation to real-world distractors, featuring 60 naturalistic salient sounds (e.g., ambulance siren, dog bark) presented during goal-directed auditory discrimination tasks involving pure tones, frequency-modulated sweeps, and speech syllables. Novel behavioral and preprocessed electroencephalography (EEG) open-source data are made available from twenty-seven healthy human volunteers performing goal-directed auditory tasks validated across three spectrotemporally different acoustic contexts, along with all task stimuli files. Behavioral data confirmed that distractors significantly modulated task performance across all three auditory tasks, and EEG spectral analyses demonstrated significant power changes linked to auditory distractors. To support accurate source-level analyses, we also provide all individual-specific structural MRIs (3.0 T), 3D head shape digitization files and computed forward models.