The Magic, Memory, and Curiosity fMRI Dataset of People Viewing Magic Tricks

Videos of magic tricks offer lots of opportunities to study the human mind. They violate the expectations of the viewer (i.e., causing strong prediction errors), misdirect attention, and elicit a variety of epistemic emotions such as surprise and curiosity. Herein we describe and share the Magic, Memory, and Curiosity (MMC) dataset where 50 participants watched 36 magic tricks which were filmed and edited specifically for functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) experiments. The MMC dataset includes contextual incentive manipulation, curiosity ratings for the magic tricks, as well as incidental memory performance tested a week later. fMRI data were acquired before, during, and after learning. We show that both behavioural and fMRI data are of high quality, as indicated by basic validation analysis, i.e., variance decomposition as well as intersubject correlation and seed-based functional connectivity, respectively. The richness and complexity of the MMC dataset will allow researchers to explore dynamic cognitive and motivational processes from various angles.