Arousal and Salience Across Age fMRI (ds001242)

This OpenNeuro release holds the brain MRI behind a study by Mara Mather's group at the University of Southern California on how arousal changes attention in younger and older adults. Participants first learned that one of two tones predicted a mild shock. In the main task the tones were played before pairs of place and object pictures, and people reported where the higher-contrast picture appeared. The study tested whether arousal, through the locus coeruleus noradrenaline system, boosts brain responses to salient input more in younger than in older adults. The data went public on OpenNeuro in 2018 as ds001242 under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License; the current snapshot is 1.0.0 from June 2019.

Composition

The participants table lists 52 healthy adults with an age group and sex for each: 28 younger adults (9 women) and 24 older adults (9 women). The paper gives the age ranges as 18 to 34 and 55 to 75; individual ages are not shared. Every subject has anatomical, diffusion and functional images, 540 NIfTI files in total.

Acquisition

All scans come from a Siemens 3 T Magnetom Trio with a 32-channel head coil. The anatomical folder holds a 1 mm MPRAGE T1-weighted image and a T1-weighted fast spin echo scan of 11 axial 2.5 mm slices, used to measure neuromelanin signal in the locus coeruleus. The neuromelanin files are stored as hidden files with a .bidsignore prefix because BIDS had no suffix for them. The diffusion scan has one b=0 volume and 64 volumes at b=1000. The functional runs are gradient-echo EPI with TR 2 s and 4 mm slices: one fear-conditioning run, one place localizer run and up to five spatial detection runs. Eye-tracking (pupil) and ECG, respiration and skin conductance recordings accompany the task runs.

Annotations

There are no image annotations. BIDS events files give the timing of tones, pictures and responses.

Known limitations

• Ages are only given as two groups, not per person.
• Some subjects have fewer than five spatial detection runs.
• Two subjects (01 and 44) have two MPRAGE images because they left the scanner between runs.
• The first three volumes of each functional run were removed before release.
• The physiological sidecars warn of scanner noise in some ECG and pupil recordings; the authors excluded several subjects from those analyses.
• One site, small groups.