Shedding light on the frontal hemodynamics of spatial working memory using functional near-infrared spectroscopy

Shedding light on the prefrontal correlates of mental workload in simulated driving: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

“…Most prior research to (simulated) driving did not engage in channel-wise analysis and thus no comparisons can be drawn. The finding does however coincides with fNIRS 23 and fMRI 50,51 laboratory findings regarding spatial working memory, which also most strongly activates rMFG/ rDLPFC regions. It stands to reason that spatial working memory plays an important role in maneuvering complex driving scenarios because drivers have to be aware of and integrate a multitude of fix and moving parts to derive operating action plans.…”

“…Both a rise in concentration of oxygenated blood and a decline in concentration of deoxygenated blood can be regarded as the result of neuronal activity. In a laboratory setting, fNIRS-studies have mainly reported two regions that show workload-related activity changes in the n-back task, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) 20,21 and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) [21][22][23] . fNIRS however does not suffer from the same restrictions as fMRI and EEG regarding movement or environmental interferences and thus as well has gained more and more popularity in driving research.…”

Investigating mental workload-induced changes in cortical oxygenation and frontal theta activity during simulated flights

“…Looking at cortical oxygenation changes in Hbr using fNIRS, we found a mirrored pattern of four channels per hemisphere that showed significant differences between difficulty levels. Higher task difficulty was generally associated with lower Hbr concentrations, adding to previous results on Hbr in n-back tasks 20 , 21 . Discrimination was better in the right DLPFC as compared to the left, in line with previous findings 20 .…”

“…Higher task difficulty was generally associated with lower Hbr concentrations, adding to previous results on Hbr in n-back tasks 20 , 21 . Discrimination was better in the right DLPFC as compared to the left, in line with previous findings 20 . However, channel sensitivity changed with the comparison of different difficulty levels and no single channel could discriminate all four levels.…”

“…We focus on results in Hbr as it is found to be less influenced by systemic noise 49 , 50 and to correlate higher with the BOLD signal 51 than Hbo. In addition, there is evidence that by using a GLM approach and analyzing beta coefficients, Hbr outperforms Hbo in discriminating multiple n-back difficulties and MWL levels in a simulated driving task 20 , 24 . Hbo results are included in Supplement Table S1 .…”