Cognition

Cognitive and behavioural neuroscience spans a broad range of experimental paradigms, and its open data ecosystem has developed complementary vocabularies, annotation tools, and repositories that increasingly align with BIDS and NWB to support interoperability with neural recording datasets.

Standards and annotation

Cognitive Atlas provides a controlled vocabulary of cognitive processes and experimental tasks, establishing a shared language for describing what participants do in neuroscience experiments. NBO (Neurobehavior Ontology) covers behavioural and neurological phenotypes across species, supporting cross-species comparisons and clinical phenotype description. HED (Hierarchical Event Descriptors) provides structured, machine-readable event annotation at the trial level, integrated with both BIDS and NWB, bridging behavioural task structure and neural recordings across modalities.

Data archives

Open behavioural datasets that accompany neural recordings are deposited on OpenNeuro as BIDS-formatted sidecar files. Stand-alone behavioural datasets without neural recordings are commonly deposited on OSF or Zenodo. ANC (Austrian NeuroCloud) is a dedicated open repository for neurocognitive data built around BIDS and HED, and participates in Neurobagel federated search as the first European Neurobagel node. Unlike neuroimaging and electrophysiology, cognitive and behavioural neuroscience does not yet have a domain-wide standard for purely behavioural datasets. The BIDS-Behavior extension under active community development aims to bring consistent metadata and folder structure to stand-alone behavioural data.

Findability and task design

Findability is a particular challenge for cognitive and behavioural datasets because standardisation is less mature and deposition is scattered. OpenNeuro indexes BIDS event and sidecar files, enabling task-based search across its repository. Neurosynth enables semantic search of the fMRI literature by mapping activation coordinates to Cognitive Atlas terms, making the cognitive neuroscience literature searchable by construct rather than keyword. Structured event annotation with HED improves downstream discoverability by making study content machine-readable at the trial level.

Open experiment creation tools include OpenSesame (with its OSWeb component for online deployment via JATOS) and jsPsych. Depositing paradigm code on OSF alongside pre-registration entries is increasingly standard practice.

Notable open datasets

• The Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) is a large-scale fMRI dataset in which eight participants each viewed approximately 10,000 natural images across multiple sessions, available in BIDS format on OpenNeuro.
• THINGS-EEG provides EEG recordings of neural responses to a large structured set of object images from the THINGS concept database, deposited on OpenNeuro.
• Human Connectome Project includes an extensive behavioural battery covering cognitive, emotional, and personality measures alongside its neuroimaging data.

For the neuroimaging and electrophysiology datasets that pair neural recordings with behavioural designs, see Neuroimaging and Electrophysiology. For a step-by-step guide to formatting and depositing a dataset with behavioural components, see Sharing your data.