General Information

News

2024/04/02 - Take the  NSD / large-scale neuroimaging dataset anonymous survey ! Deadline May 15, 2024.
2023/11/22 - A minor error was discovered in the implemented transformation from anatomical to functional space for each given NSD subject (see  Technical notes  for details). The error is very minor, and so we have not changed any data files.
2023/08/20 - All data and files associated with the last 3 NSD core scan sessions have now been publicly released.
2021/12/16 - The NSD data paper is now published in Nature Neuroscience.
2021/09/03 - The NSD dataset is now released, and version 1.1 of the NSD Data Manual is now complete. A video walkthrough of NSD data files is also now available (details below).
2021/02/15 - Version 1.0 of the NSD Data Manual is now complete.

Basic information

Welcome to the  Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) Data Manual . This web site provides a detailed, technical description of all NSD data files that are available. It will be updated as questions and issues arise. The information on this site is also available as a single downloadable PDF  (last snapshot 2023/08/20 - version 1.3)  (this may be convenient for performing "Find" queries).

If you want to browse or download the data, please see  How to get the data .

The official paper that formally describes the NSD dataset is available as:
We refer to this as the "NSD data paper". The data paper has some associated online resources at the  NSD OSF site . The contents of this data manual assume familiarity with the data paper.


Announcements and updates to the NSD dataset will be documented and logged on this page, so check back regularly.

If you have questions about the NSD dataset, please either (1) post your question to the  nsd-users mailing list , (2) open an issue or discussion on the relevant github repository (e.g.  http://github.com/cvnlab/nsdcode/  or  http://github.com/cvnlab/nsddatapaper/ ), (3) send queries directly to  kay@umn.edu , or (4) submit anonymous feedback/suggestions via this  Google form.  Please let us know if there is missing documentation or if something is not clear.

Change history

Substantive changes to NSD data files are documented and logged here:
2023/08/20 - The files related to the last 3 NSD core scan sessions from each subject are now publicly released.
2023/05/27 - The files related to the final memory test (nsdmemory) are now publicly released. See  Experiments  and  Behavioral data .
2022/08/15 - In nsddata/inspections/rois/prf-visualandecc/, a few visualizations were incorrect. Specifically, the files "subj02_prf-eccrois_on_eccentricity.png" and "subj02_prf-visualrois_on_angle.png" have now been corrected.
2022/01/26 - For user convenience, we now provide some additional versions of the nsddata/stimuli/prf stimulus files (description has been updated in  Experiments ).
2021/10/20 - Diffusion derivatives are now available (nsddata_diffusion/) and documented in the data manual (see  Diffusion data ). Summary b=0 diffusion files (called nsddata/ppdata/subj*/anat/DWI_*.nii.gz) and associated nsddata/inspections/coregistration/*DWI* files have been created to help visualize the quality of the pre-processed diffusion data and their registration to the T1+T2 anatomy. In addition, the "knowndataproblems.txt" file has been slightly updated/modified.
2021/09/03 - Initial public release of the NSD dataset.
2021/09/02 - actually add split-half ncsnr (noise ceiling) files (this was for some reason not completed on the previous iteration on 2021/08/07)
2021/08/07 - add additional files pertaining to BOLDscreen calibration; add information on race to nsddemographics.xlsx; include Phase component of the SWI scans to the raw BIDS data; add split-half ncsnr (noise ceiling) files; add pre-processed eyetracking data and inspection figures
2021/07/23 - design .tsv files for the nsdsynthetic experiment were incorrect; these have been fixed.
2021/05/16 - Added probmap .mgz files (see  ROIs ) and associated .png surfacevisualizations (see  Data inspections )
2020/12/20 - Official version 1.0 release of nsd_mapdata (in the  nsdcode  repository).

Community-driven content

If you have NSD-related information, tools, resources, tutorials, or links that you would like to share with the community, please contact  kay@umn.edu  and the information can be listed here.
nsdexamples ( http://github.com/kendrickkay/nsdexamples ). These example scripts, written by Kendrick Kay, were created to demonstrate some basic loading, analysis, and visualization of the NSD dataset.
nsd_access ( https://github.com/tknapen/nsd_access ). This toolbox, written by Tomas Knapen, provides a convenient Python-based interface to the NSD dataset. There are also some examples of how to load data and perform basic visualization. The toolbox also enables easy access to COCO image annotation information, including category labels and bounding boxes.   

Papers and pre-prints

Here are links to papers that use NSD data.

Here are links to conference papers and pre-prints that use NSD data.