Selective Auditory Attention Decoding for Bilateral Cochlear Implant Users and Normal Hearing Listeners in Duet Music

This dataset was collected for the article of the same name published in Journal of Neural Engineering. It was used to investigate whether it is possible to perform selective auditory attention decoding for music in cochlear implant users via electroencephalography (EEG). The dataset consists of the EEG data of 8 CI users, 8 normal hearing listeners, and the presentation files. Experimental Setup The EEG recording took place in an electromagnetically and acoustically shielded booth. A high-density continuous EEG was recorded using a SynAmps RT System with 64 electrodes mounted in a quik-cap electrode cap (Compumedics Neuroscan, Australia). The reference electrode was placed on the tip of the nose and two additional measuring electrodes were placed on the mastoids.The sampling rate was 20 kHz with an internal hardware low-pass filter of 1,500 Hz. EEG electrodes with high impedance were excluded from further analysis ( > 100 kΩ). During the measurement, each participant was asked to sit still, keep their eyes open, and focus on a cross displayed on a screen to reduce physiological artifacts.For participants with normal hearing, the auditory stimuli were delivered through an A-10 amplification system (Pioneer Corporation, Tokyo, Japan) along with inserted earphones (E-A-RTONE Gold 3 A, 3 M, St. Paul, Minneapolis).The software Presentation (Neurobehavioral Systems, Berkeley, USA) was used to present the stimuli and was synchronized with the EEG recording computer by sending TTL triggers.For CI users, music stimuli were presented via a TV audio streamer (Cochlear Ltd, Sydney, Australia). Stimuli were dichotically presented for both groups, i.e. one instrument on each side, and they were swapped in the second half of the experiment. Participants were asked to attend to each instrument on each side in each block of 4 excerpts (in total 8 minutes per block), resulting in a total recording of 32 minutes with attention to each of the two instruments on both sides per participant.The presentation level of the music was set to a loudness level of 6 ("comfortably loud") on a 10-point scale where '0' is inaudible and '10' is a painfully loud. For further information, see Althoff & Nogueira (2026). Althoff, J., & Nogueira, W. (2026). Selective auditory attention decoding in bilateral cochlear implant users to music instruments. Journal of Neural Engineering. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-2552/ae3a1a