Cognitive Psychologists Ready fNIRS for Innovative Research

NSF. MRI. fNIRS. This really isn’t alphabet soup!

In fall 2023, Lawrence Technological University received a substantial three-year multi-disciplinary MRI (Major Research Instrumentation) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the acquisition of a highly sophisticated research system known as fNIRS (functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy).

Building Long-Term Research Capacity

“We received the award in September 2023,” said Corey Bohil, PhD, principal investigator (PI) of the grant, and College of Arts and Sciences (CoAS) associate dean of research and professor of psychology. “In the first year, we had to complete the training by the vendor, start training our own research assistants to collect clean data using the system, and over the summer, we’ve been collecting pilot data.”

Equipping and opening the Computational Cognition Laboratory in the CoAS building was the first step. With colleagues Franco Delogu, PhD, professor of psychology, and Hamad Al-Azary, PhD, assistant professor of psychology, the cognitive psychologists have been probing “how can I use this” to further their own research.

“It’s important to understand this is not a research grant; this is a major instrumentation grant,” Delogu said. “So, when NSF gives you the money, NSF hopes you are going to use this machinery to enhance your research for years to come. It’s not limited to, let’s say, three years. It’s ongoing. When they evaluate the soundness of the proposal, the focus is on the instrumentation and its ability to improve the research potential of the team, not on the specific lines of research. How can this equipment enhance the research lines in our institution?”

Al-Azary agrees.

“That may be the most important point,” he said. “This is a tool that can support a lot of intellectual ideas between the three of us and also the senior personnel beyond the PI and the co-PIs.”

fNIRS: A Multidisciplinary Research Tool

In the grant application, each of the seven co-applicants, from CoAS, Business and Information Technology, and Engineering, presented their proposed use of fNIRS for their respective research areas of interest.

“The same piece of equipment can be used to investigate very different hypotheses,” Delogu said. “It’s like a car that can be used to deliver mail or deliver pizza or for a variety of other uses.”

He cited the sophisticated eye tracking devices he and others have been using since 2019 to illustrate how a single piece of equipment can be used to research various scientific hypotheses.

The question each of the fNIRS researchers asks is “How can I use this neuroimaging equipment in the context of my own research program?”

fNIRS uses a cap with optical sensors, called optodes, to project near-infrared light through the skull into the brain’s cortex. Since oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin in the blood absorb this light differently, detectors measure the light that scatters back to the scalp, tracking blood flow changes that indicate neural activity.

If neurons have been recently active in a task, the body sends oxygenated blood to replenish that region. This allows researchers to infer that spot was recently active. fNIRS only get about three centimeters deep through the skull into the outer part of the brain, the cortex. Much of the cognition that’s taking place relies heavily on that part of the brain.

“Underneath that, there are a lot of other structures, subcortical structures, that are important for all sorts of other perception and motor activity and cognition,” Bohil said. “We can’t reach those regions with fNIRS. While fMRI can reach those subcortical structures, it costs millions of dollars to acquire the equipment, and it costs several hundred dollars to collect a single session of data, fNIRS is mobile and significantly less expensive to collect this data. The trade-off is we can only get the cortical outer regions.”

Advancing Cognitive Research

Delogu proposes to integrate fNIRS in a study he is coordinating about fast decision making in competitive games: “Specifically, our team uses eye tracking, behavioral measures, and portable EMG to investigate cognitive strategies involved in the game of Morra, an ancient game still widespread in many European countries. fNIRS will allow us to investigate intersubjective cortical synchronization in competitive situations or, in more simple terms, the way two opponents use the same brain regions at the same time when competing in a game.”

Al-Azary studies how concepts are understood. He proposes to use fNIRS and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to investigate conceptual processing. Previous studies haven’t been able to confirm whether parts of the brain are activated or deactivated during conceptual processing. The current research program will pair fNIRS with transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS), a tool already in the LTU Computational Cognition Lab.

“Basically,” Al-Azary said, “this is a continuation of and builds upon my previous research, but with the benefit of new and emerging technology like fNIRS.”

When Bohil joined his two cognitive psychology colleagues, CoAS increased its critical mass for this type of research. Coupling fNIRS with eye-tracking devices and tDCS in the Computational Cognition Lab puts LTU on par with the state of the art for cognitive science research.

These highly innovative programs provide LTU students unique opportunities for cutting edge research that can be easier to manage than a larger university.

“There are much larger universities who have fewer cognitive psychologists than Lawrence Tech at this time, which allows us to conduct significant collaborative research,” Bohil said.