Applications of Optical Neuroimaging in Usability Research

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Human Factors Engineering
• Usability Research

Background:

• Optical neuroimaging techniques offer non-invasive methods to study brain activity.
• Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a cost-effective and easily implementable optical neuroimaging method.
• fNIRS measures hemodynamic responses, reflecting neural activity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review recent and potential applications of optical neuroimaging, specifically fNIRS, in human factors and usability research.
• To highlight fNIRS's utility in assessing psychological phenomena relevant to human factors.
• To discuss the capabilities and limitations of fNIRS for measuring mental activity during task completion.

Main Methods:

• Review of existing literature on fNIRS applications in human factors and usability.
• Focus on studies assessing cognitive workload, attention, and motor activity using fNIRS.
• Analysis of fNIRS's ability to measure hemodynamic correlates of mental activity.

Main Results:

• fNIRS has been successfully applied to assess various psychological phenomena in human factors research.
• The technique provides valuable data on cognitive workload and attention during task performance.
• fNIRS enables the measurement of brain activity in real-world usability settings.

Conclusions:

• fNIRS is a promising tool for human factors and usability research due to its practicality and effectiveness.
• It offers a unique opportunity to understand cognitive processes during human-computer interaction and task execution.
• Further research is needed to explore the full potential and address limitations of fNIRS in these fields.