Modulation of Neural Activity during Guided Viewing of Visual Art

Mobile Brain-Body Imaging (MoBI) technology was deployed at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MARCO) in Monterrey, México, in an effort to collect Electroencefalographic (EEG) data from large numbers (N = ~1200) of participants and allow the study of the brain’s response to artistic stimuli, as part of the studies developed by University of Houston (TX, USA) and Tecnológico de Monterrey (MTY, México).In this dataset, we include EEG recordings corresponding to brain activity of 25 subjects (ages 18-30) as they walked through one of the exhibits (artist: Otto Dix) included in this data-collection protocol. Recordings include a baseline (BL) control condition devoid of artistic stimuli and 8 states of viewing art, which correspond to the same art pieces in the same order, for every subject, and which have a duration of 2 minutes, in average.Approximately half of the participants included in this dataset were provided with an explanation of each art piece (Guided-E), while the others were given no explanation (Guided-NE) as their activity was recorded. Subjects and corresponding data were labeled, accordingly.The study was performed using portable Muse (InteraXon, Inc, Toronto, ON, Canada) headbands with four dry electrodes located at AF7, AF8, TP9, and TP10.These data were selected for distribution as they have already been used for publication: Herrera-Arcos, Tamez-Duque, et al. Nov 2017, Front. Hum. Neurosci. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2017.00581.