Stress states are increasing with global urbanization, but evidence on the physiological impact of urban blue-space exposure remains limited compared to green spaces. In this randomized within-subject crossover study, we examined the physiological ef...
14 May 2021
Introduction: Differences in cognitive performance with exercise between men and women have previously been reported. In this study, we evaluated between-sex differences in oxygenation of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) with moderate-intensity aerobic ex...
Previous studies have indicated that changes in oxygenated hemoglobin concentration (O2Hb) in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are associated with changes in cognitive function. Therefore, the present study aimed to explore the effect of differences in O2...
Background/Objectives: The use of theta-burst stimulation (TBS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) to modulate cognitive function is gaining increasing interest, since it is more time-efficient than standard repetitive transcranial magne...
Background: Studies have demonstrated that fear memories can be modified using non-invasive methods. Recently, we demonstrated that anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is capable of enhanc...
Objective: To investigate the intervention effect of orienteering exercises on the spatial memory ability of college students of different genders and its underlying mechanism. Methods: Forty-eight college students were randomly screened into experim...
We aimed to answer the question “why do people run the track counterclockwise (CCW)?” by investigating the neurophysiological differences in clockwise (CW) versus CCW direction using motor imagery. Three experiments were conducted with he...
(1) Background: Cerebral autoregulation is altered during acute mild traumatic brain injury, or concussion. However, it is unknown how a history of concussion can impact cerebral haemodynamic activity during a task that elicits an autoregulatory resp...
Background: Road safety improvement is a governmental priority due to driver-caused accidents. Driving style variation affects safety, with emotional regulation being pivotal. However, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) studies show incons...
Brain dopamine, in relation to the limbic system, is involved in cognition and emotion. These functions are asymmetrically processed. Hypertension not only alters such functions but also their asymmetric brain pattern as well as their bilateral patte...
Overgeneral autobiographical memory (AM) manifests in individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) tested during depressed (dMDD) or remitted phases (rMDD), and healthy individuals at high-risk (HR) for developing MDD. The current study aimed to...
Prefrontal cortex activity facilitates emotion regulation by cognitive reappraisal. Yet, neuroimaging studies have yielded disparate findings as to whether relatively greater left or right prefrontal activity is more beneficial for reappraisal succes...
Background/Objectives: Migraine with aura (MwA) is a heterogeneous disorder comprising pure visual aura (MwAv) and more complex phenotypes with additional somatosensory and/or dysphasic symptoms (MwAvsd). Previous structural magnetic resonance imagin...
Functional neuroimaging studies of neuropsychiatric disorders and cognitive impairment are commonly conducted in the clinic setting but less so in the acutely medically ill while hospitalized. This is largely due to technical and logistical limitatio...
Long-term physical training is known to induce brain plasticity, yet how these neural adaptations evolve across different stages of training remains underexplored. This two-year longitudinal study investigated the stage-dependent effects of endurance...
30 May 2022
We created an indoor forest bathing environment in a sunlight-type environmentally controlled chamber and both physiological and psychological measurements were conducted for the evaluation of mental fatigue reduction. At first, a working memory load...
This study investigates how the sound of a hair dryer influences users’ perceptions of its quality, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation. Eighteen participants were involved in a with...
Hemispheric differences in emotional processing have been observed for over half a century, leading to multiple theories classifying differing roles for the right and left hemisphere in emotional processing. Conventional acceptance of these theories...
Individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) struggle with impaired verbal fluency as an executive function. The left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the right inferior frontal gurus (IFG), which show reduced...
Positive outcome expectancy is a crucial cognitive factor influencing aggression, yet its neural basis remains unclear. Therefore, the present study combined voxel-based morphometry (VBM) with a resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) analysis t...
Background/Objectives: This study explores variations in brain activity between individuals with dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (DAT) and healthy older adults during a resting state using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Methods...
Structural plasticity changes and functional differences in executive control tasks have been reported in bilinguals compared to monolinguals, supporting a proposed bilingual ‘advantage’ in executive control functions (e.g., task switchin...
Acupuncture is an alternative treatment for primary dysmenorrhea (PDM). However, mechanisms by which acupuncture exerts its analgesic properties are still unclear. This study aimed to explore the cerebral blood flow (CBF) response to verum and sham a...
The purpose of this pilot study was to investigate whether transcranial static magnetic field stimulation (tSMS), which can modulate cortical excitability, would influence inhibitory control function when applied over the dorsolateral prefrontal cort...
This study investigated the cognitive and neural mechanisms of exact and approximate arithmetic using fNIRS technology during natural calculation processes (i.e., the production paradigm). Behavioral results showed (1) a significantly longer reaction...
12 November 2020
Background: There is little understanding on how brief relaxation practice and viewing greenery images would affect brain responses during cognitive tasks. In the present study, we examined the variation in brain activation of the prefrontal cortex d...
5 April 2025
This study aimed to address the unexplored relaxing effects of stargazing with different night sky darknesses in a planetarium by conducting an experiment to investigate the physiological effects of the relaxation/stress state on brain and autonomic...
Objective: The objective of this research is to better understand the effects of upper limb fatigue on the cerebral cortex. The aim of this study was to investigate the characteristics of cerebral oxygenation and cortical functional connectivity in h...
Dual-site transcranial magnetic stimulation to the primary motor cortex (M1) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) can be used to probe functional connectivity between these regions. The purpose of this study was to characterize the effect of DL...
Considering the advantages of brain stimulation techniques in detecting the role of different areas of the brain in human sensorimotor behaviors, we used anodal transcranial direct-current stimulation (a-tDCS) over three different brain sites of the...
Social exclusion refers to the experience of rejection by one or more people during a social event and can induce pain-related sensations. Cyberball, a computer program, is one of the most common tools for analyzing social exclusion. Regions of the b...
2 November 2022
Objective: The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is strongly associated with mood symptoms. This study used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology to explore the features of brain neural activity in the dlPFC of anxious and dep...
The aim of the present study was to examine the neurobiological correlates of the two negative symptom domains of schizophrenia, the Motivational Deficit domain (including avolition, anhedonia, and asociality) and the Expressive Deficit domain (inclu...
Social and environmental influences are important for learning. However, the influence of reward and competition during social learning is less understood. The literature suggests that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is implicated in hot executive...
Background/Objectives: Epilepsy is a chronic brain disease characterized by recurrent epileptic seizures. It affects roughly 50 million people worldwide and around one third of the patients have drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE). The current study aimed...
Anxiety is associated with an exaggerated expectancy of harm, including overestimation of how likely a conditioned stimulus (CS+) predicts a harmful unconditioned stimulus (US). In the current study we tested whether anxiety-associated expectancy of...
It is reasonable to assume that emotional processes are involved in creative tasks and the generation of creative ideas. In this pilot study, we investigate the emotional correlates in professional drummers during different degrees of creative music...
The current experiment investigated bilingual language control within the dual mechanisms framework. In an fMRI investigation of morphosyntactic rule production, the presence or absence of target language cues was manipulated to investigate the neura...
Background and Objectives: In this study, the role of oxyhemoglobin (HbO) in subregions of the prefrontal cortex during a static balance task under eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions was investigated in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) using f...
(1) Background: The uncinate fasciculus (UF) is a white matter bundle connecting the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe. The functional role of the uncinate fasciculus is still uncertain. The role of the UF is attributed to the emotional empathy net...
This study aimed to investigate differences in prefrontal cortex activation between older adults with and without depressive symptoms during cognitive tasks using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We examined 204 older participants witho...
Electroencephalographic studies using graph-theoretic analysis have found aberrations in functional connectivity in dyslexics. How visual nonverbal training (VT) can change the functional connectivity of the reading network in developmental dyslexia...
Studies of novel noun learning show bilingual children rely less on the Mutual Exclusivity Constraint (MEC) for word learning than monolinguals. Shifting the focus to learning novel property terms (adjectives), the present study compared 3.5- and fiv...
Schizophrenia and depression are psychiatric disorders with overlapping clinical and biological features. This study aimed to identify common and distinct neuropathological mechanisms in schizophrenia and depression patients using resting-state funct...
Background: Worry proneness has been proposed to influence uncertainty processing; however, its neural mechanisms during different forms of uncertain decision-making remain poorly understood. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMR...
Difficulty sleeping in a novel environment is a common phenomenon that is often described as the first night effect (FNE). Previous works have found FNE on sleep architecture and sleep power spectra parameters, especially during non-rapid eye movemen...
Background: Expectation is a powerful cognitive modulator of pain, but how different types of emotion regulation approaches interact with expectancy to influence pain processing remains unclear. The present study compared self-selected habitual strat...
Social cognition and emotion are ubiquitous human processes that recruit a reliable set of brain networks in healthy individuals. These brain networks typically comprise midline (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex) as well as lateral regions of the brain...
The current study examined whether discrete numerical estimation is based on the same cognitive process as estimation of continuous magnitudes such as weight and time. While the verbal estimation of numerical quantities has a contingent unit of measu...
Background: Children and adolescents with congenital heart disease (CHD) are at risk for cognitive impairments, such as executive function deficits and motor delays, which can impact their academic and adaptive functioning as well as their quality of...
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