Prefrontal cortical activation while viewing urban and garden scenes: A pilot fNIRS study

Recent studies have shown that pleasant and unpleasant emotions could be detected through functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS). This study investigates the prefrontal cortical activation in human subjects while they were viewing urban and garden scenes. A multi-channel continuous wave fNIRS system was used to record the prefrontal cortical activations from seven subjects. During the data collection, the subjects viewed 40 trials of video clips. In each trial, the subjects viewed a video of randomized urban or garden scenes for 30s followed by 30s of idle scene which showed a dark blue progress bar on black background on the screen. NIRS-SPM is employed to work out the changes of hemoglobin response and the prefrontal cortical activations were generated using group analysis based on the contrasts of urban versus idle, garden versus idle and urban versus garden. The activation for the contrast of urban versus garden showed an increase of oxy-hemoglobin on the right area of the prefrontal cortex with p < 0.05. This preliminary result showed that the garden scene might provide a pleasant and less stressful experience as compared to the urban scene for subjects. This suggests the possibility of using a NIRS-based Brain-Computer Interface to detect subject preferences of different scenes.