Arithmetic tasks in different formats and their influence on behavior and brain oxygenation as assessed with near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS): a study involving primary and secondary school children

Abstract

This study investigated whether near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) can be used to measure the processing of arithmetic problems in school children. Another aim was to assess whether distinct formats of such problems would lead to different neural processing. Two large samples of school children from different age groups were examined while calculating or reading arithmetic problems that were either presented in numeric or in word format. As expected, we found that, compared to reading, calculation resulted in greater average oxygenation in parietal and posterior frontal regions. Neither format nor age had a significant effect on brain oxygenation. We were able to demonstrate that NIRS measurements can readily be conducted with children and in school settings, which is an indication for the ecological validity of this measurement technique.

Bringing brain imaging to the school to assess arithmetic problem solving: chances and limitations in combining educational and neuroscientific research

“…Therefore, solving word problems was much more demanding for the adults. This is indicated by the error rates, which was higher for word than numeric problems in the Richter et al study, but not in the current study (see Dresler et al 2009). …”

“…We conducted a 2 9 2 9 2 9 3 ANOVA with the factors format, grade, complexity, and competency (low, average, high). For the NIRS data analysis, we defined the same parietal region of interest (ROI) as in our previous studies Dresler et al 2009). This region covers parts of the superior and inferior parietal lobe surrounding the intraparietal sulcus.…”

“…Then values of the ROI channels per hemisphere were averaged and these values were used for further analysis. In Dresler et al (2009) activation levels during calculation were contrasted with a reading condition. As we were only interested in differential influences on calculation processes, we conducted an ANOVA with the aforementioned factors and with NIRS activation during calculation (AUC per second) as the dependent variable.…”

Recovery of cortical functioning in abstinent alcohol-dependent patients: Prefrontal brain oxygenation during verbal fluency at different phases during withdrawal

“…Compared to fMRI, NIRS provides the advantages of being less restrictive (natural sitting posture without head fi xation, narrow environment and noise), less expensive, less sensitive to motion artifacts and highly accepted by participants. Therefore it is optimally suited for claustrophobic or elder participants (Herrmann et al 2008;Zeller et al 2010), psychiatric patients (Fallgatter et al 1997(Fallgatter et al , 2004Kubota et al 2005;Kameyama et al 2006;Schecklmann et al 2007Schecklmann et al , 2008b and children (Dresler et al 2009). The method has proven to be highly reliable (Plichta et al 2006Schecklmann et al 2008a); however, it comes at the cost of only being able to measure cortical structures.…”

Effect of a socıal defeat experıence on prefrontal actıvıty ın schızophrenıa

“…Since fNIRS is relatively insensitive to motion artifacts, subjects can be examined in a natural sitting position, without any surrounding distraction (Takizawa et al, 2008). For example, fNIRS has been used in real-world situations (Dresler et al, 2009) such as face-to-face communication (Suda et al, 2010) and interpersonal cooperation (Cui et al, 2012). …”