HED Task Catalog

The HED Task Catalog (called the Catalog on this site) is a curated vocabulary of the standard tasks used in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience experiments, and of the cognitive processes those tasks engage. The Catalog exists so that datasets can be categorized by what their participants were asked to do, in terms that are the same across laboratories. The HED Task Catalog began as an effort to curate the Cognitive Atlas (called the Atlas on this site) into a form that might be usable for dataset annotation. See The Catalog vs the Atlas for how the two relate.

In addition, The Catalog vs CogPO and HED vs CogPO explore the relationship between the HED Task Catalog, Hierarchical Event Descriptors (HED), and another important ontological resource in this domain, the Cognitive Paradigm Ontology (CogPO).

The initial curation of the HED Task Catalog was done by Kay Robbins with the assistance of Claude Opus 4 and, more recently, of Claude Fable 5. The Catalog is under review by the HED Working Group and other interested parties. The next goal is to curate and augment the Catalog with respect to the datasets on NEMAR.

New to the Catalog? Start with the Introduction, which explains what the Catalog contains and where to begin. Planning to tag a dataset or to read a task page closely? See How to use the Catalog.

Status and how to contribute

The Catalog is a work in progress and its curation is a continuing process, not a finished product. Tasks, processes, categories and task families will keep changing as the Catalog is used. Suggestions, corrections and ideas are welcome: please open an issue at https://github.com/hed-standard/hed-task/issues/new/choose, where a form for a new task, a new variation, a new process or a correction asks for what the Catalog needs. The repository’s contributing guide describes the process. A proposal for a new task is most useful when it comes with the procedure as steps, its manipulations and its measurements in the form the inclusion tests use; a proposal for a new process is most useful when it says when in a trial the process happens, what elicits it and how it is measured.