Thalamocortical Hierarchical Cognitive Control

This OpenNeuro release (ds005600) holds the raw MRI data of a University of Iowa study on the role of the thalamus in hierarchical cognitive control. Healthy adults performed a task in which a context cue decided which of several response rules applied, so they had to keep track of the current context and switch between contexts. The authors used evoked responses, decoding and a thalamocortical activity flow model to show that thalamic nuclei encode task context and help shape context-related cortical activity. The data are shared under a CC0 waiver.

Composition

The release contains 59 right-handed adults (44 women, 15 men) with a mean age of 22.3 years and no reported neurological history. They are what remained of 74 participants after exclusions for low task accuracy, equipment failure, dropout and head motion. Each participant has one T1-weighted image, eight task fMRI runs with event files and spin-echo EPI fieldmaps with opposite phase encoding. There is no participants table, so age and sex per subject are not part of the release.

Acquisition

Scans were acquired on a 3T GE SIGNA Premier scanner with a 48-channel head coil at the Magnetic Resonance Research Facility of the University of Iowa. The structural image is a 3D MPRAGE with 1 mm isotropic voxels. Functional runs use gradient-echo EPI with a repetition time of 1.8 s, an echo time of 30 ms and 2.5 mm voxels. Each run lasts about nine minutes and contains 51 trials.

Known limitations

• Single site and scanner, and a sample of young, mostly female adults.
• Only participants who passed the accuracy and motion criteria are included.
• The dataset metadata still carries placeholder text for funding and the full task name.
• The release holds only the 59 healthy participants analysed in the paper.