Near-infrared spectroscopy as a tool for driving research

Abstract

Driving a motor vehicle requires various cognitive functions to process surrounding information, to guide appropriate actions, and especially to respond to or integrate with numerous contextual and perceptual hindrances or risks. It is, thus, imperative to examine driving performance and road safety from a perspective of cognitive neuroscience, which considers both the behaviour and the functioning of the brain. However, because of technical limitations of current brain imaging approaches, studies have primarily adopted driving games or simulators to present participants with simulated driving environments that may have less ecological validity. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a relatively new, non-invasive brain-imaging technique allowing measurement of brain activations in more realistic settings, even within real motor vehicles. This study reviews current NIRS driving research and explores NIRS’ potential as a new tool to examine driving behaviour, along with various risk factors in natural situations, promoting our understanding about neural mechanisms of driving safety.

Practitioner Summary: Driving a vehicle is dependent on a range of neurocognitive processing abilities. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a non-invasive brain-imaging technique allowing measurement of brain activation even in on-road studies within real motor vehicles. This study reviews current NIRS driving research and explores the potential of NIRS as a new tool to examine driving behaviour.

Keywords:

• Driving
• road safety
• brain imaging
• ecological validity
• near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Other notable biological chromophores that absorb near-infrared light include myoglobin and cytochrome oxidase in mitochondria (see Hoshi 2003).

2. The reasoning for the relative nature of CW data is the fact that the optical path taken by the light signal (i.e. the depth to which the banana shape penetrates the brain) is not precisely known, but can only be estimated given probabilistic characteristics of the skull/scalp thickness and brain volume/baseline blood volume/oxygenation of humans (e.g. Okamoto et al. 2004). Thus, the device can only record relative concentration changes given a certain fixed probe placement (Hoshi 2003).

3. Some recent software for NIRS data analysis includes NIRS-SPM (bio imaging signal processing lab at KAIST, http://bispl.weebly.com/nirs-spm.html), NIRFAST (optics in medicine at Dartmouth, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nir/nirfast/index.php) and TOAST (University College London, http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/research/vis/toast).