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Description: Joint focus of attention between two individuals can influence the way that observers attend, encode and value items. Using a non-predictive gaze cuing task, where a disembodied face acted as gaze cue, we previously found that working memory (WM) was better for jointly attended (validly cued) versus invalidly cued coloured squares (no influence on WM was found using non-social cues). Here we developed this paradigm using complex objects in realistic social environment. Human, computer generated avatars are presented in virtual reality (VR) looking at or away from kitchen items (cup, bowl, teapot, plate) presented on a table. Participants are required to remember the location of the objects and their status (e.g. whether the cup contained coffee). A non-social control condition where a stick points at or away from items is also presented. During presentation EEG was recorded in order to investigate the influence of sharing attention on decreases and increases in alpha and theta during encoding and memory retrieval. This work is published in SCAN: https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/17/6/531/6437613 (open access) and the data is described in a data in brief article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352340922000397?via%3Dihub