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Wholehead HD fNIRS for Selective Attention Analysis
Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Sudan Duwadi1 (sudan@bu.edu), De'Ja Rogers1, Alex D. Boyd1, Laura Carlton1, Yiwen Zhang1, Anna Kawai Gaona1, Grace Magee1, Bernhard Zimmermann1, W.Joe O'Brien1, Alexander von Luhmann2,3, David A. Boas1, Meryem A. Yucel1, Kamal Sen1; 1Neurophotonics Center, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, USA, 2Intelligent Biomedical Sensing (IBS) Lab, Machine Learning Department, Technical University of Berlin, 10587 Berlin, Germany, 3BIFOLD – Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, 10587 Berlin, Germany
Complex Scene Analysis (CSA) enables the brain to focus on a single auditory or visual object in crowded environments. While this occurs effortlessly in a healthy brain, many hearing-impaired individuals and those with neurodivergent conditions such as ADHD and autism experience difficulty in CSA, impacting speech intelligibility (Dunlop et al., 2016). We propose using high-density (HD) functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) for whole-head brain imaging during complex scene analysis (CSA) in naturalistic settings. This approach allows analysis of cortical activity patterns, with potential applications in enhancing brain-computer interface technologies. Our experimental design mimics an ecologically valid cocktail party scenario in both overt and covert contexts. In the overt scenario, 3-second audiovisual movie clips are presented simultaneously at 30 degrees to the left and right. Prior to each clip, a 2-second spatialized white noise cue is paired with a white crosshair on the corresponding screen, guiding subjects on which direction to focus, with eye movements allowed. In the covert scenario, subjects are exposed solely to spatialized audio from the same set of movies. Here, the 2-second spatialized white noise serves as the cue, directing their attention, while they maintain a gaze on a central screen displaying a static white crosshair. fNIRS data were collected from 9 subjects with a whole head, high density cap layout. Our results show evoked responses in somatosensory association, primary motor, premotor and supp’ motor, left primary somatosensory, right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and right visuomotor areas in both overt and covert conditions but not in control condition.
Topic Area: ATTENTION: Spatial