Mobile EEG Recordings in an Art Museum Setting

Recent advances in scalp electroencephalography (EEG) as a neuroimaging tool have now allowed researchers to overcome technical challenges and movement restrictions typical in traditional neuroimaging studies.  Fortunately, recent mobile EEG devices have enabled studies involving cognition and motor control in natural environments that require mobility, such as during art perception and production in a museum setting, and during locomotion tasks. Nevertheless, datasets that include brain activity (EEG) acquired ‘in action and in context’ in complex real settings are not readily available to the scientific community. To address this need, we acquired data from 431 participants (208 males/223 females; age range 6-81 years) using five mobile EEG systems (four dry and one gel-based devices) as the volunteers were behaving freely as they viewed the exhibit ‘The Boundary of Life is Quietly Crossed’ by Dario Robleto (Cruz-Garza et al., 2017; Kontson et al., 2015).  In addition, indoor positioning data, demographic data, and questionnaire data about art preference and other variables were also acquired.  A total of 207 subjects completed the questionnaire. The experiment took place at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, USA over 22 weeks. Due to technical issues resulting from the unconstrained and unsupervised nature of the study (e.g., poor wireless communication, file corruption, sensor disconnection, low system battery, etc.), the de-identified multimodal dataset contains EEG data from only 134 individuals (77 males/53 females; age range 15-77 years) that participated in the art viewing task (Cruz-Garza et al., 2017; Kontson et al., 2015). Using these datasets, we evaluated the signal quality and usability of each of the devices in a natural environment (Cruz-Garza et al., 2017), and identified neural signatures within each of the datasets related to the aesthetic experience (Kontson et al., 2015). The unique dataset will provide researchers with the opportunity to further investigate the brain responses of free-behaving individuals in complex natural settings.

corresponding author: Contreras-Vidal, Jose L. (jlcontreras-vidal@uh.edu)