The Role of the Prefrontal Cortex and Functional Connectivity during Maritime Operations: An fNIRS study

Abstract

Introduction Watchkeeping is a significant activity during maritime operations, and failures of sustained attention and decision‐making can increase the likelihood of a collision. Methods A study was conducted in a ship bridge simulator where 40 participants (20 experienced/20 inexperienced) performed: (1) a 20‐min period of sustained attention to locate a target vessel and (2) a 10‐min period of decision‐making/action selection to perform an evasive maneuver. Half of the participants also performed an additional task of verbally reporting the position of their vessel. Activation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) was captured via a 15‐channel functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) montage, and measures of functional connectivity were calculated frontal using graph‐theoretic measures. Results Neurovascular activation of right lateral area of the PFC decreased during sustained attention and increased during decision‐making. The graph‐theoretic analysis revealed that density declined during decision‐making in comparison with the previous period of sustained attention, while local clustering declined during sustained attention and increased when participants prepared their evasive maneuver. A regression analysis revealed an association between network measures and behavioral outcomes, with respect to spotting the target vessel and making an evasive maneuver. Conclusions The right lateral area of the PFC is sensitive to watchkeeping and decision‐making during operational performance. Graph‐theoretic measures allow us to quantify patterns of functional connectivity and were predictive of safety‐critical performance.

Functional Effects of Bilateral Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Modulation During Sequential Decision-Making: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study With Offline Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation

“…fNIRS may allow cost-and time-effective monitoring of hemodynamic correlates of such interventions, aiming to improve their efficiency through repeated investigation and analysis of individual neural responsiveness. fNIRS has been already successfully used for this purpose in research in natural environments [e.g., assessing dual tasks performance while walking and executing an arithmetic task (Lu et al, 2015), cognitive control while playing a simple game task (Witte et al, 2015), skill acquisition during repeated flight simulator training and n-back working memory tasks (Choe et al, 2016), and decision-making and sustained attention in marine evasive maneuver task (Fan et al, 2020) among others]. Therefore, fNIRS may be considered as a suitable alternative to other neuroimaging techniques (e.g., fMRI, computed tomography) for cognitive intervention research and in future studies addressing sequential decision-making.…”

Metabolic Connectivity and Hemodynamic-Metabolic Coherence of Human Prefrontal Cortex at Rest and Post Photobiomodulation Assessed by Dual-Channel Broadband NIRS

“…Prefrontal connectivity is of essential significance in reflecting cognitive functions and the severity of cognition-impairing diseases [47][48][49][50][51]. Thus, various reports have been published to reveal ∆[HbO]-derived hemodynamic connections within the prefrontal cortex [48,[52][53][54][55].…”

Effect of Shift Work on Cognitive Function in Chinese Coal Mine Workers: A Resting-State fNIRS Study

“…Small-world parameters ( ): modular processing and efficient transmission of information between network characteristics modules and generally defined as [ 53 , 54 ]: where , , and are the clustering coefficients, AL and are the characteristic path lengths, and are the average clustering coefficient and characteristic path length of the real network and a random network ( ) [ 52 ].…”