A naturalistic fMRI dataset in response to public speaking

Public speaking serves as a powerful tool for informing, inspiring, persuading, motivating, or entertaining an audience. While some speeches effectively engage audience and disseminate knowledge, others fail to resonate. This dataset presents functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from 31 participants (14 females; age: 22.29 ± 2.84 years) who viewed two informative speeches with varying effectiveness, selected from YiXi talks (similar to TED Talks), and matched in length and topic. A total of 22 participants (10 females; age: 22.64 ± 2.77 years) who completed the full task were included in the validation analyses. A comprehensive validation process, involving behavioral data analysis and head motion assessment, confirmed the quality of the fMRI dataset. While previous analyses have used inter-subject correlation to examine neural synchronization during the reception of informative public speaking, this dataset can be utilized for a variety of analyses to further elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying audience engagement and effective communication.