Multiculturalism in Singapore fMRI (CUET)

This dataset holds the brain MRI from a social neuroscience study at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on how a shared national culture changes the way people perceive faces of their own and other ethnic groups. Participants saw faces of Chinese, Indian, Arab and Caucasian women, each preceded by a photo of a landmark that pointed either to an ethnic homeland (for example the Taj Mahal) or to Singapore itself (for example the Merlion). The authors report that same- and other-race faces engaged similar brain networks only after the Singapore context, which they call an enlarged in-group effect. The images were deposited in DR-NTU (Data) by Gianluca Esposito and published in February 2022 under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Composition

The record contains 54 zip archives named CUET_0001 to CUET_0056 (numbers 0039 and 0040 are missing), one per participant, plus a participant table. The table lists 48 participants, 24 women and 24 men, with sex, session date and age; six archives have no row in it. The analysed sample in the preprint is the same 48: Singaporean Chinese students aged 21 to 26 (mean 22.81), right-handed and without psychological or neurological history.

Acquisition

All scans were made on a 3 T Siemens Magnetom Prisma with a 64-channel head coil. The preprint describes a 1 mm MPRAGE and a gradient-echo EPI task run with a 2 s repetition time and 3 mm voxels. The archives hold the scanner's DICOM export. Archive CUET_0001 also contains a localizer, a field map, a resting-state BOLD run, three task runs with the scanner's motion-corrected copies and online t-maps, and diffusion trace and ADC images. The other archives were not checked for this entry.

Annotations

There are no image labels. The study page names heart, skin conductance and thermal recordings and questionnaires as part of the protocol, but those are not in this record.

Known limitations

The study description speaks of 50 planned participants, the archive holds 54 and the analysis used 48, without a stated reason for the difference. The preprint has not been peer reviewed and gives doi:10.21979/N9/IC672L as the data location, which is not publicly reachable. Files are raw DICOM with no BIDS conversion or event files, and the headers in CUET_0001 still carry the birth date. Use is limited to non-commercial purposes.