Last week Artinis was present at the 2016 2f-NIRS conference in Montpellier, France. This two-day conference, titled NIRS signal: from acquisition to analysis, provided us with a great platform to not only display our products, but also to live demo the OctaMon and our new 3D software extension in a practical fNIRS workshop.

For the workshop we were set the challenge of performing a hyperscanning task:  the mirror game. The results were very interesting.

For the mirror game task two participants were asked to slide a handle along a string. Participant 1, the follower, was asked to follow the movements of participant 2, the leader. The leader was told to move the handle in such a way that the follower would lose track of the leader. Two OctaMon were used in the experiment and the NIRS data was recorded by our software, OxySoft.

In the data you can clearly see that the leader shows more prefrontal activation than the follower. We saw similar results in all our experiments that day, 4 in total. It appears that improvising and creating new movements from scratch (the leader) is more demanding for the prefrontal cortex than to simply follow (follower).

We would like to thank Prof. Stephane Perrey and the organizing committee for organizing the 3rd 2f-NIRS conference and providing us with a great opportunity to demonstrate our products, the OctaMon and the 3D extension of OxySoft. We were delighted by the active participation of the researchers in our practical fNIRS workshop and were very pleased with the results. The OctaMon proved to be a very convenient device for hyperscanning experiments.

For more info about the mirror game experiment hit the download button.

Mirror task image from Mathieu Gueugnon et al. (2016). “The acquisition of socio-motor improvisation in the mirror game.”Hum. Mov. Sc. 46:117-128.