The NIMH intramural healthy volunteer dataset: A comprehensive MEG, MRI, and behavioral resource.

The NIMH Healthy Research Volunteer Dataset is a collection of phenotypic data characterizing healthy research volunteers using clinical assessments such as assays of blood and urine, mental health assessments, diagnostic and dimensional measures of mental health, cognitive and neuropsychological functioning, structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), along with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and a comprehensive magnetoencephalography battery (MEG). In addition, blood samples of healthy volunteers are banked for future analyses. All data collected in this protocol are broadly shared in the OpenNeuro repository, in the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) format. In addition, task paradigms and basic pre-processing scripts are shared on GitHub. There are currently few open access MEG datasets, and multimodal neuroimaging datasets are even more rare. Due to its depth of characterization of a healthy population in terms of brain health, this dataset may contribute to a wide array of secondary investigations of non-clinical and clinical research questions.

Racial disparities in school-based disciplinary actions are associated with county-level rates of racial bias.

There are substantial gaps in educational outcomes between black and white students in the United States. Recently, increased attention has focused on differences in the rates at which black and white students are disciplined, finding that black students are more likely to be seen as problematic and more likely to be punished than white students are for the same offense. Although these disparities suggest that racial biases are a contributor, no previous research has shown associations with psychological measurements of bias and disciplinary outcomes. We show that county-level estimates of racial bias, as measured using data from approximately 1.6 million visitors to the Project Implicit website, are associated with racial disciplinary disparities across approximately 96,000 schools in the United States, covering around 32 million white and black students. These associations do not extend to sexuality biases, showing the specificity of the effect. These findings suggest that acknowledging that racial biases and racial disparities in education go hand-in-hand may be an important step in resolving both of these social ills.

Reporting on the temporal properties of visual events masked with continuous flash suppression.

To what extent can individuals introspect on dynamic properties of masked stimuli? Specifically, can observers report about the order in which a visual stimulus occurs, relative to a behavior, even when that stimulus is dramatically reduced in visibility via masking? Masking stimuli using continuous flash suppression, we asked participants to report on whether the stimulus appeared before or after a button-press. Data collected across three studies are consistent with the notion that information on the temporal order of events is preserved even when the visibility of the event in question is impoverished. These data may suggest that dynamic properties of masked stimuli are a promising set of features for understanding questions regarding an observer's perceptual experience and limitations of high-level information processing.

Mind control? Creating illusory intentions through a phony brain-computer interface.

Can one be fooled into believing that one intended an action that one in fact did not intend? Past experimental paradigms have demonstrated that participants, when provided with false perceptual feedback about their actions, can be fooled into misperceiving the nature of their intended motor act. However, because veridical proprioceptive/perceptual feedback limits the extent to which participants can be fooled, few studies have been able to answer our question and induce the illusion to intend. In a novel paradigm addressing this question, participants were instructed to move a line on the computer screen by use of a phony brain-computer interface. Line movements were actually controlled by computer program. Demonstrating the illusion to intend, participants reported more intentions to move the line when it moved frequently than when it moved infrequently. Consistent with ideomotor theory, the finding illuminates the intimate liaisons among ideomotor processing, the sense of agency, and action production.