EEG-based BCI Dataset of Semantic Concepts for Imagination and Perception Tasks

Abstract

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a widely-used neuroimaging technique in Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) due to its non-invasive nature, accessibility and high temporal resolution. A range of input representations has been explored for BCIs. The same semantic meaning can be conveyed in different representations, such as visual (orthographic and pictorial) and auditory (spoken words). These stimuli representations can be either imagined or perceived by the BCI user. In particular, there is a scarcity of existing open source EEG datasets for imagined visual content, and to our knowledge there are no open source EEG datasets for semantics captured through multiple sensory modalities for both perceived and imagined content. Here we present an open source multisensory imagination and perception dataset, with twelve participants, acquired with a 124 EEG channel system. The aim is for the dataset to be open for purposes such as BCI related decoding and for better understanding the neural mechanisms behind perception, imagination and across the sensory modalities when the semantic category is held constant.