The Cogitate Consortium has officially launched its large-scale open-access multimodal dataset, marking a transformative moment for open and inclusive neuroscience.
The first release includes intracranial EEG (iEEG) data from 38 patients across three international sites, all recorded under a standardized protocol designed to test competing theories of consciousness. With high-resolution brain recordings, synchronized eye tracking and behavioral data, this is one of the largest public iEEG datasets available to the global research community. Cogitate researcher, Alex Lepauvre, PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, went the extra mile and prepared a Jupyter notebook (https://github.com/Cogitate-consortium/iEEG-data-release/blob/main/notebooks/ieeg-data-release.ipynb), which serves as both a tutorial and a reproducible analysis pipeline. This valuable resource enables other researchers to quickly explore the dataset, adapt the workflows to their own hypotheses, and build upon the provided code with ease.
Future releases will include MEG (102 subjects) and fMRI (122 subjects) datasets, which will become available following the publication of their respective Scientific Data papers (currently under review).
This ambitious effort reflects years of coordinated, global collaboration, bringing together researchers, theorists, clinicians, and software engineers to make high-quality neuroscience data freely available to all, regardless of geography or institutional resources.
“When I was doing my PhD in Chile, intracranial data felt like science fiction. It was something only labs in the Global North had access to. That feeling of being outside the conversation stuck with me. Today, we’re helping change that. This dataset is for everyone , wherever you’re based, whatever resources you have. It’s not just open science. It’s inclusive science,” says Lucia Melloni of the MPIEA.
Researchers are also invited to register their ideas via the Cogitate Project Registry, an open-science platform to claim credit, prevent scooping, build collaborations, and trace the evolution of scientific ideas over time.
Seedat, A., Lepauvre, A., Jeschke, J., Gorska-Klimowska, U., Armendariz, M., Bendtz, K., Henin, S., Hirschhorn, R., Brown, T., Jensen, E., Kozma, C., Mazumder, D., Montenegro, S., Yu, L., Bonacchi, N., Das, D., Kahraman, K., Sripad, P., Taheriyan, F., Devinsky, O., Dugan, P., Doyle, W., Flinker, A., Friedman, D., Lake, W., Pitts, M., Mudrik, L., Boly, M., Devore, S., Kreiman, G., & Melloni, L. (2025). Open Multi-Center Intracranial Electroencephalography Dataset With Task Probing Conscious Visual Perception. Scientific Data, 12, 854.
Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-04833-z
Data: https://www.arc-cogitate.com/data-release
Code: https://github.com/neurologic/cogitate-msp1
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
