This article presents behavior and EEG dataset collected from 19 healthy human volunteers (10 females) in the age group of 21–29 (mean = 26.9, SD = ±2.15) years at National Brain Research Centre, India during a psychophysical paradigm customized to characterize the brain network interactions during saliency processing. We provide all the raw stimulus files used in developing the experimental paradigm of the linked research article “Organization of directed functional connectivity among nodes of ventral attention network reveals the common network mechanisms underlying saliency processing across distinct spatial and spatio-temporal scales” [1] for replication and use by researchers across various cohorts of the population. Pre-processed EEG time-series segmented into epochs corresponding to three experimental trial conditions, across two visual attention tasks testing the effect of salient distractors on goal-driven tasks are provided. The dataset also includes reaction times corresponding to individual trials. Additionally, structural MRI files corresponding to each individual and 3D EEG sensor locations of all volunteers are provided to assist in accurate source localization. Therefore, the presented dataset will not only facilitate the conventional time resolved EEG analysis like evoked activity and time-frequency analysis at the sensor level but will also facilitate the investigation of source level analysis like global coherence or phase-amplitude coupling within selected regions of the brain. © 2021 The Authors