Working Memory Disruption and Altered Alpha Dynamics In Misophonics

This dataset is related to project on misophonia and working memory. The publication is in write-up at the time of this writing and will be linked appropriately. Concurrent behavioral data files (in the form of subject-level .mat files) can be found in a derivatives folder titled "Behavioral Data". ## PROJECT OVERVIEW Misophonia is characterized by disproportionate emotional and physiological responses to specific "trigger" sounds, often accompanied by self-reported difficulty maintaining focus. This study sought to provide objective evidence of such cognitive disruptions by combining behavioral measures of auditory working memory (WM) with electroencephalographic (EEG) indices of neural processing. Fifty-five participants (23 misophonic, 32 control) completed a pitch-matching WM task under three distractor conditions: silence, neutral sounds, and individualized trigger sounds. ## TASK DESCRIPTION Participants were presented with a pure tone target to remember and later reproduce. After the target presentation, an 8-second retention interval followed. The first 3.5 seconds of this retention interval included a distractor period during which one of three conditions was applied. In the neutral condition, the retention interval was filled with an emotionally neutral sound, as verified for each participant through a stimulus ranking task completed on day 1 of the project. In the trigger condition, the distractor was a triggering or aversive sound, selected using the same stimulus ranking task. In the silent condition, no distractor was presented. At the end of the retention interval, participants reproduced the pitch of the target tone by adjusting the pitch of a response tone. The response tone was controlled by moving a finger along the x-axis of a MIDI touchpad device. The accuracy and precision of these adjustments were analyzed alongside EEG activity during the retention interval. ## DATA DESCRIPTION The dataset consists of single-session recordings collected using a 70-channel BioSemi ActiveTwo system, including 64 EEG channels and 6 external channels. The root directory contains BIDS-compliant EEG data. These data were imported into EEGLAB, high-pass filtered at 1 Hz, low-pass filtered at 50 Hz, and re-referenced to the average reference. No additional artifact rejection, independent component removal, or other data-cleaning steps were applied. The derivatives folder contains the processed datasets in the original format used by the experimenter. This includes the original subfolder structure and MATLAB-specific file formats, allowing direct replication of the published analyses using the analysis pipelines provided in the code folder. To replicate the data processing pipeline, run the "Misocogmasterpipeline.m" file. To replicate the statistical analysis, run "MisoCogERSPExploreAll.m"