Climate change presents a fundamental threat to human populations and ecosystems across the globe. Neuroscience researchers have recently started developing ways to advance research on this topic. However, validated questionnaires, experimental stimuli, and fMRI tasks are still needed. Here we describe the CLIMATE BRAIN dataset, a multimodal collection of questionnaire, behavioural, and neuroimaging data related to climate change, acquired from 160 healthy individuals. In particular, it includes data from (1) various questionnaire measures, including the Inventory of Climate Emotions (ICE); (2) a neuroimaging task for measuring emotional reactions to standardized Emotional Climate Change Stories (ECCS); and (3) a neuroimaging task based on Carbon Emission Task (CET) to measure climate action-taking. For technical validation, we provide image quality metrics and show the evidence for the effectiveness of tasks consistent with prior studies. To our knowledge, the proposed dataset is currently the only publicly available resource specifically designed to investigate human brain responses to climate change.

Musical training exemplifies the acquisition of bimanual skills through sustained practice. However, the bimanual aspect of musical training was rarely investigated in the context of neuroplastic changes over extended durations. This longitudinal study tracked a group of twenty-four young adult novice pianists over their initial twenty-six weeks of piano training and compared them to trained musicians. The novices performed a piano playing task in the fMRI scanner using an MRI-compatible keyboard at six time-points, in increasing time intervals, while the musicians performed the task once. Brain activation and training-induced changes were assessed in bimanual symmetric and asymmetric conditions. Executing the piano task elicited canonical auditory-motor brain activation patterns in the novices. However, the two conditions exhibited significant differences in the motor, parietal and insular cortices bilaterally, and in the right dorsal premotor cortex and left cerebellum. The time-course of neuroplastic reorganisation depended on the bimanual demands of the task. In the symmetric condition, brain activation in the insula and right inferior frontal gyrus decreased continuously, while the activation in the cortical and subcortical areas of the motor network increased at various stages of training. In the asymmetric condition, regions-specific decreases in brain activation were observed in the supplementary motor, parietal, and insular cortex, and the cerebellum. Before training, brain activation differences were observed between the novices and musicians only in the asymmetric condition; these differences were not present upon training completion. These findings highlight the transition from spatial attention to automated movements during piano training. In the asymmetric condition, the additional demands of bimanual coordination in novices were related to increased brain activation in the motor system, which diminished as training progressed. Thus, the changes in task-related brain activation were highly context-dependent and demand-driven, a factor to consider when designing and evaluating music-based health interventions.

Climate change is widely recognised as an urgent issue, and the number of people concerned about it is increasing. While emotions are among the strongest predictors of behaviour change in the face of climate change, researchers have only recently begun to investigate this topic experimentally. This may be due to the lack of standardised, validated stimuli that would make studying such a topic in experimental settings possible. Here, we introduce a novel Emotional Climate Change Stories (ECCS) stimuli set. ECCS consists of 180 realistic short stories about climate change, designed to evoke five distinct emotions—anger, anxiety, compassion, guilt and hope—in addition to neutral stories. The stories were created based on qualitative data collected in two independent studies: one conducted among individuals highly concerned about climate change, and another one conducted in the general population. The stories were rated on the scales of valence, arousal, anger, anxiety, compassion, guilt and hope in the course of three independent studies. First, we explored the underlying structure of ratings (Study 1; n = 601). Then we investigated the replicability (Study 2; n = 307) and cross-cultural validity (Study 3; n = 346) of ECCS. The collected ratings were highly consistent across the studies. Furthermore, we found that the level of climate change concern explained the intensity of elicited emotions. The ECCS dataset is available in Polish, Norwegian and English and can be employed for experimental research on climate communication, environmental attitudes, climate action-taking, or mental health and wellbeing. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13428-024-02408-1.

Learning to play the piano is a unique complex task, integrating multiple sensory modalities and higher order cognitive functions. Longitudinal neuroimaging studies on adult novice musicians show training-related functional changes in music perception tasks. The reorganization of brain activity while actually playing an instrument was studied only on a very short time frame of a single fMRI session, and longer interventions have not yet been performed. Thus, our aim was to investigate the dynamic complexity of functional brain reorganization while playing the piano within the first half year of musical training. We scanned 24 novice keyboard learners (female, 18–23 years old) using fMRI while they played increasingly complex musical pieces after 1, 6, 13, and 26 weeks of training. Playing music evoked responses bilaterally in the auditory, inferior frontal, and supplementary motor areas, and the left sensorimotor cortex. The effect of training over time, however, invoked widespread changes encompassing the right sensorimotor cortex, cerebellum, superior parietal cortex, anterior insula and hippocampus, among others. As the training progressed, the activation of these regions decreased while playing music. Post hoc analysis revealed region-specific time-courses for independent auditory and motor regions of interest. These results suggest that while the primary sensory, motor, and frontal regions are associated with playing music, the training decreases the involvement of higher order cognitive control and integrative regions, and basal ganglia. Moreover, training might affect distinct brain regions in different ways, providing evidence in favor of the dynamic nature of brain plasticity.