When visual input has conflicting interpretations, conscious perception can alternate spontaneously between these possible interpretations. This is called bistable perception. Previous neuroimaging studies have indicated the involvement of two right parietal areas in resolving perceptual ambiguity (ant-SPLr and post-SPLr). Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies that selectively interfered with the normal function of these regions suggest that they play opposing roles in this type of perceptual switch. In the present study, we investigated this fractionation of parietal function by use of combined TMS with electroencephalography (EEG). Specifically, while participants viewed either a bistable stimulus, a replay stimulus, or resting-state fixation, we applied single pulse TMS to either location independently while simultaneously recording EEG. Combined with participant’s individual structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, this dataset allows for complex analyses of the effect of TMS on neural time series data, which may further elucidate the causal role of the parietal cortex in ambiguous perception.
behavioural_data
Each participant’s data are saved in a separate file, e.g. ‘psychophysics_participant_[participant_numer].mat’. The file is a Matlab structure array containing five fields: button presses for the pre-experiment are saved in ‘pre_button’, those for the main experiment in ‘main_button’. Both are a matrix in which each column is a separate trial. Each row is a frame in the presentation of a stimulus. At a refresh rate of 120 Hz this means that 120 rows comprise a second of experimentation. For each frame, a value of 1 indicates a right button press, a value of -1 a left button press and a value of 0 that no button was pressed. ‘pre_gamma’ contains the gamma shape and scale parameter resulting from the pre-experiment. Dominance durations for the main experiment’s replay stimulus were sampled from this gamma distribution. ‘main_conditions’ is a vector containing the order in which conditions appeared through the trials. Lastly, ‘main_output’ summarises statistics computed from the experiment, each row is one of the five experimental runs. The columns are trial number, median dominance for the sphere turning left, median dominance for the sphere turning right, median dominance for all percepts, number of percept switches and total mixed percept durations, as well as gamma shape and scale parameters for each trial’s dominance durations.
MRI_scans
There are 16 files in the repository, one scan for each participant in NIFTI format. The filename is equivalent to the participant number.
17_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 17.
26_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 26.
32_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 32.
34_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 34.
35_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 35.
36_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 36.
41_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 41.
71_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 71.
73_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 73.
74_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 74.
75_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 75.
79_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 79.
80_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 80.
81_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 81.
87_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 87.
88_EEG_data
EEG data for participant 88.