Ultra high-density 255-channel EEG-AAD dataset

Experiment
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This dataset contains 255-channel electroencephalography (EEG) data collected during an auditory attention decoding experiment (AAD). The EEG was recorded using a SynAmps RT device (Compumedics, Australia) at a sampling rate of 1 kHz and using active Ag/Cl electrodes. The electrodes were placed on the head according to the international 10-5 (5%) system. 30 normal hearing male subjects between 22 and 35 years old participated in the experiment. All of them signed an informed consent form approved by the KU Leuven ethical committee.

Two Dutch stories narrated by different male speakers divided into two parts of 6 minutes each were used as the stimuli in the experiment [1]. A single trial of the experiment involved the presentation of these two parts (one of both stories) to the subject through insert phones (Etymotic ER3A) at 60dBA. These speech stimuli were filtered using a head-related transfer function (HRTF) such that the stories seemed to arrive from two distinct spatial locations,  namely left and right with respect to the subject with 180 degrees separation. In each trial, the subjects were asked to attend to only one ear while ignoring the other. Four trials of 6 minutes each were carried out, in which each story part is used twice. The order of presentations was randomized and balanced over different subjects. Thus approximately 24 minutes of EEG data was recorded per subject.

File organization and details
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The EEG data of each of the 30 subjects are uploaded as a ZIP file with the name Sx.tar.gzip here x=0,1,2,..,29. When a zip file is extracted, the EEG data are in their original raw format as recorded by the CURRY software [2]. The data files of each recording consist of four files with the same name but different extensions, namely, .dat, ,dap, .rs3 and .ceo. The name of each file follows the following convention: Sx_AAD_P. With P taking one of the following values for each file:
1. 1L
2. 1R
3. 2L
4. 2R

The letter 'L' or 'R' in P indicates the attended direction of each subject in a recording: left and right respectively. A MATLAB function to read the software is provided in the directory called scripts. A python function to read the file is available in this Github repository [3].

The original version of stimuli presented to subjects, i.e. without the HRTF filtering, can be found after extracting the stimuli.zip file in WAV format. There are 4 WAV files corresponding to the two parts of each of the two stories. These files have been sampled at 44.1 kHz. The order of presentation of these WAV files is given in the table below:

Additional files (after extracting scripts.zip and misc.zip):

1. scripts/sample_script.m: Demonstrates reading an EEG-AAD recording and extracting the start and end of the experiment.
2. misc/channel-layout.jpeg: The 255-channel EEG cap layout
3. misc/eeg255ch_locs.csv: The channel names, numbers and their spherical (theta and phi) scalp coordinates.

[1] Radioboeken voor kinderen, http://radioboeken.eu/kinderradioboeken.php?lang=NL, 2007 (Accessed: 8 Feb 2021)

[2] CURRY 8 X – Data Acquisition and Online Processing, https://compumedicsneuroscan.com/product/curry-data-acquisition-online-processing-x/ (Accessed: 8, Feb, 2021)

[3] Abhijith Mundanad Narayanan, "EEG analysis in python", 2021. https://github.com/mabhijithn/eeg-analyse , (Accessed: 8 Feb, 2021)