A Large Video Set of Natural Human Actions for Visual and Cognitive Neuroscience Studies and Its Validation with fMRI

The investigation of the perception of others’ actions and underlying neural mechanisms has been hampered by the lack of a comprehensive stimulus set covering the human behavioral repertoire. To fill this void, we present a video set showing 100 human actions recorded in natural settings, covering the human repertoire except for emotion-driven (e.g., sexual) actions and those involving implements (e.g., tools). We validated the set using fMRI and showed that observation of the 100 actions activated the well-established action observation network. We also quantified the videos’ low-level visual features (luminance, optic flow, and edges). Thus, this comprehensive video set is a valuable resource for perceptual and neuronal studies.