Naturalistic fMRI and MEG recordings during viewing of a reality TV show.

Recent advances in the cognitive neuroscience of language have embraced naturalistic stimuli such as movies and audiobooks. However, most open-access neuroimaging datasets still focus on single-speaker scenarios, falling short of capturing the complexity of real-life, multi-speaker communication. To address this gap, we present the BABA functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) dataset, in which two independent cohorts (N = 30 each) viewed the same 25-minute excerpt from a Chinese reality TV show-one group in the fMRI scanner and the other in the MEG scanner. Set in a rural village, the show features 11 speakers, including five father-child pairs, engaging in spontaneous, emotionally rich dialogue with overlapping speech, rapid turn-taking, and natural interruptions. The combined use of fMRI and MEG allows researchers to explore both spatial and temporal aspects of language processing. This resource opens new avenues for studying neural mechanisms of multi-speaker comprehension, attentional shifts, and authentic social communication.