Large brain mapping dataset expands with new cognitive tasks

The Individual Brain Charting (IBC) project has released its fifth and largest update of high-resolution fMRI data, adding a new set of cognitive tasks to one of the most detailed brain-mapping datasets available today. The dataset, which is openly accessible through EBRAINS, is described in a new publication in Nature Scientific Data. 

The new release expands the dataset with 18 tasks collected from 11 participants under tightly controlled, standardised conditions – bringing many of them close to 40 hours of scanned data each. 

The IBC project launched in 2014 and was funded by the Human Brain Project. It aims to map how individual brains respond across a wide range of cognitive functions. By repeatedly scanning the same participants with diverse tasks – from mathematics and spatial navigation to emotion recognition, reward processing, and working memory – the team is building an exceptionally rich resource for studying individual variability in brain organization. 

In most studies, you compare different groups of people doing different tasks, and you lose important individual details. Here, we have the same participants performing many tasks under the same conditions, which lets us see how different cognitive processes come together in a single brain." 

Ana Fernanda Ponce, researcher at Paris-Saclay University and first author of the study

With this release, the dataset now includes 67 tasks, 530 contrasts (comparisons between task conditions), and 188 cognitive concepts, creating an increasingly comprehensive foundation for fine-grained brain mapping and computational modelling. 

The IBC dataset is a valuable resource for modelling and understanding brain function – for example, for validating new models in cognitive mapping or AI-driven models of neural activity. Because the same individuals are scanned across such a wide range of tasks, researchers can explore how different cognitive processes interact within a single brain and check how well brain models can handle different tasks or contexts. 

All data are openly available through the EBRAINS Knowledge Graph, which hosts the IBC collection in compliance with FAIR and GDPR standards. 

One of the biggest challenges in studies that collect a large set of data is to find volunteers who are motivated to keep returning for scanning sessions, Ponce says. "Participants were really engaged, and we're incredibly grateful for their commitment."