Effect of short-term intensive design-based STEM learning on executive function: an fNIRS study of the left-behind children.

Design-based STEM learning is believed to be an effective cross-disciplinary strategy for promoting children's cognitive development. Yet, its impact on executive functions, particularly for disadvantaged children, still need to be explored. This study investigated the effects of short-term intensive design-based STEM learning on executive function among left-behind children. Sixty-one Grade 4 students from a school dedicated to the left-behind children in China were sampled and randomly assigned to an experimental group (10.70 ± 0.47 years old, n = 30) or a control group (10.77 ± 0.43 years old, n = 31). The experimental group underwent a two-week design-based STEM training program, while the control group participated in a 2-week STEM-related reading program. Both groups were assessed with the brain activation from 4 brain regions of interest using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and behavioral measures during a Stroop task before and after the training. Analysis disclosed: (i) a significant within-group time effect in the experimental group, with posttest brain activation in Brodmann Area 10 and 46 being notably lower during neutral and word conditions; (ii) a significant between-group difference at posttest, with the experimental group showing considerably lower brain activation in Brodmann Area 10 and Brodmann Area 46 than the control group; and (iii) a significant task effect in brain activity among the three conditions of the Stroop task. These findings indicated that this STEM learning effectively enhanced executive function in left-behind children. The discrepancy between the non-significant differences in behavioral performance and the significant ones in brain activation implies a compensatory mechanism in brain activation. This study enriches current theories about the impact of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) learning on children's executive function development, providing biological evidence and valuable insights for educational curriculum design and assessment.

Decreased frontal lobe complexity in left-behind children during joint attention: a fNIRS study with multivariable and multiscale sample entropy analysis.

Human brain development is shaped by experiences, especially during preschool, the critical period for cognitive and socioemotional development. This study employed the functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy technique to explore the neural differences between left-behind children (LBC) and non-left-behind children (NLBC) on joint attention. Through collecting brain image data of 50 children (26 boys, aged 65.08 ± 6.28 months) and conducting multivariable and multiscale sample entropy (MMSE) analysis, the present study found that: (i) LBC showed lower brain complexity than NLBC in right prefrontal cortex; (ii) all participants demonstrated higher brain complexity in responding to joint attention conditions, compared to initiating joint attention ones; (iii) their brain complexity during joint attention was negatively associated with their emotional abilities. The findings advance our understanding of early brain development in LBC by providing evidence for the neural process characteristics of joint attention. Implications for early intervention to promote their brain development are also addressed.

Understanding the Effect of Listening to Music, Playing Music, and Singing on Brain Function: A Scoping Review of fNIRS Studies.

Music is integrated into daily life when listening to it, playing it, and singing, uniquely modulating brain activity. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), celebrated for its ecological validity, has been used to elucidate this music-brain interaction. This scoping review synthesizes 22 empirical studies using fNIRS to explore the intricate relationship between music and brain function. This synthesis of existing evidence reveals that diverse musical activities, such as listening to music, singing, and playing instruments, evoke unique brain responses influenced by individual traits and musical attributes. A further analysis identifies five key themes, including the effect of passive and active music experiences on relevant human brain areas, lateralization in music perception, individual variations in neural responses, neural synchronization in musical performance, and new insights fNIRS has revealed in these lines of research. While this review highlights the limited focus on specific brain regions and the lack of comparative analyses between musicians and non-musicians, it emphasizes the need for future research to investigate the complex interplay between music and the human brain.

Digital Addiction Intervention for Children and Adolescents: A Scoping Review.

Digital devices play a significant role in the learning and living of children and adolescents, whose overuse or addiction has become a global concern. This scoping review seeks to synthesize existing studies to investigate relevant interventions and their effects on digital addiction in children (ages 0-18). To understand the latest advances, we have identified 17 studies published in international peer-reviewed journals between 2018-2022. The findings revealed that, first, most interventions for digital addiction in children and adolescents were cognitive-behavioral therapies (CBT) or CBT-based interventions, which could improve anxiety, depression, and related symptoms of digital addiction. Second, rather than directly targeting addictive behaviors, some family-based interventions aim to strengthen family functions and relationships. Finally, digital-based interventions, such as website-based, application-based, and virtual reality interventions, are promising in adolescent digital addiction interventions. However, these studies shared the same limitations: small sample sizes, short intervention durations, no control group, and nonrandomized assignments. The small sample size problem is difficult to solve by offline intervention. Meanwhile, online digital-based intervention is still in its infancy, resulting in limited generalizability of the findings and the inability to popularize digital intervention. Accordingly, future intervention studies should integrate various assessments and interventions to form an integrated platform to provide interventions for addicted children and adolescents worldwide.

Partner's emotions are associated with preschoolers' prefrontal activation under joint attention: An fNIRS evidence.

Emotions and joint attention are highly associated and mutually influenced during preschool, the critical period for early emotional and cognitive development. However, few studies have explored the neuropsychological mechanism of joint attention with preschoolers and their partners under different emotions. This study has examined the prefrontal activation under a comprehensive emotional joint attention task in 45 preschoolers (25 boys, Mage = 58 ± 9.02 months) to compare the different influences of partners' positive, neutral, and negative emotions. Analysis of the functional near-infrared spectroscopy data indicated that the participants' prefrontal activation triggered by joint attention in positive and negative emotions was significantly higher than in neutral emotions. Moreover, their brain synchronization intensity was significantly higher in positive emotions of joint attention than in negative emotions. These findings advance our understanding of the neural mechanism of early childhood emotional processing under joint attention and provide a neural perspective to explain the effects of different emotions on preschoolers' social cognition.

The Effects of Digital Addiction on Brain Function and Structure of Children and Adolescents: A Scoping Review.

The escalating prevalence of studies investigating digital addiction (DA) and its detrimental impact on the human brain's structure and functionality has been noticeable in recent years. Yet, an overwhelming majority of these reviews have been predominantly geared towards samples comprising college students or adults and have only inspected a single variant of DA, such as internet gaming disorder, internet addiction disorder, problematic smartphone use, tablet overuse, and so forth. Reviews focusing on young children and adolescents (ages 0-18), or those which amalgamate various types of DA, are decidedly scarce. Given this context, summarizing the effects of DA on brain structure and functionality during the vital developmental stage (0-18 years) is of immense significance. A scoping review, complying with the PRISMA extension for such reviews, was conducted to amalgamate findings from 28 studies spanning a decade (2013-2023) and to examine the influence of assorted forms of DA on the brains of children and adolescents (0-18 years). The synthesized evidence indicated two primary results: (1) DA exerts harmful effects on the structure and functionality of the brains of children and adolescents, and (2) the prefrontal lobe is the region most consistently reported as impacted across all research. Furthermore, this review discerned a notable void of studies investigating the neural indices of digital addiction, along with a shortage of studies focusing on young children (0-6 years old) and longitudinal evidence. This research could provide the necessary theoretical basis for the thwarting and intervention of digital addiction, a measure indispensable for ensuring healthy brain development in children and adolescents.

Inhibitory control associated with the neural mechanism of joint attention in preschoolers: An fNIRS evidence.

Joint attention (JA) is fundamental to the development of children's social functioning; both its response and initiation are closely related to executive function (EF), but the relationship between JA and EF has been relatively rarely studied. The present study aimed to investigate the between-condition differences in brain activation and synchronization of JA under four conditions: (1) stranger-Initiating Joint Attention (Stranger-IJA); (2) teacher-Initiating Joint Attention (Teacher-IJA); (3) stranger-Responding to Joint Attention (Stranger-RJA); and (4) teacher-Responding to Joint Attention (Teacher-RJA). It also aimed to explore the relationships between neuroimaging data and children's inhibitory control levels. To address these two goals, the present study employed 41 (aged 58.61 ± 8.64 months, 24 boys) preschool children through behavioral and functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) brain imaging assessment to measure children's EF and brain function under JA, respectively. The results revealed that: (1) a significantly higher prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation was triggered in IJA than RJA; (2) a significantly higher brain activation was triggered in JA with a stranger than with a teacher; (3) a significantly higher index of synchronization asymmetry was evoked in the left and right PFC during interaction with the teacher than with the stranger; and (4) preschoolers' brain activation and synchronization were correlated with their inhibitory control level. The findings advance our understanding of preschoolers' social cognitive development with a biological aspect, offer an opportunity to understand the potential risk of the neural disorder in preschoolers, and provide a basis and insight for preventing neural developmental disorders.

Negative affective processing is associated with cognitive control in early childhood: An fNIRS study.

The association between emotion and cognition has recently gathered interest in the field of cognitive neuroscience. However, the neural mechanism of negative emotion processing and its association with cognitive control in early childhood remains unclear. In the present study, we compared the processing of three emotions (i.e., negative, neutral, and positive emotions) and investigated the association between negative emotion processing and cognitive control in children aged 4-6 years (N = 43). Results indicated that children revealed greater brain activation when processing negative emotions than processing neutral and positive emotions. We also found a significant negative association between brain activation during negative emotion processing and reaction times of cognitive control, which represented children with better cognitive control evoked higher brain activation when processing negative emotions. The current study proposes a neural mechanism underlying emotion processing and provides important insights into the risk and future behavioral outcomes of potential psychological disorders.

Multimodal examination of emotion processing systems associated with negative affectivity across early childhood.

High Temperamental Negative Affectivity in early childhood has been found to predict later emotion dysregulation. While much work has been conducted to separately probe bio-behavioral systems associated with Negative Affectivity, very little work has examined the relations among multiple systems across age. In this study, we use multi-modal methods to index neurobiological systems associated with Negative Affectivity in 53 4-7-year-old children. Prefrontal activation during emotion regulation was measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy over the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) while children played a game designed to elicit frustration in Social (Happy and Angry faces) and Nonsocial contexts. Gaze behaviors while free-viewing Happy and Angry faces were also measured. Finally, Negative Affectivity was indexed using a score composite based on factor analysis of parent-reported temperament. Using mixed-effects linear models, we found an age-dependent association between Negative Affectivity and both PFC activation during frustration and fixation duration on the mouth area of Happy faces, such that older children high in Negative Affectivity spent less time looking at the mouths of Happy faces and had lower PFC activation in response to frustration (ps<0.034). These results provide further insight to how Negative Affectivity may be associated with changes in affective neurobiological systems across early childhood.

The Effect of Socioeconomic Disparities on Prefrontal Activation in Initiating Joint Attention: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Evidence From Two Socioeconomic Status Groups.

Low socioeconomic status (SES) may generally have a long-lasting negative effect on cognitive development, and show deficits in the development of executive functions. However, it is unclear whether there is an SES-dependent disparity in the functional brain development of the prefrontal cortex. By collecting task-related functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data and behavioral data (e.g., intelligence, language, home reading environment (HRE), family income, and parental education level), the current study aimed to detect whether the SES of preschool children (N = 86) is associated with prefrontal activation during the joint attention task. Results verified that low-SES children show lower right prefrontal activation during joint attention than Relatively High-SES children. In addition, our findings confirmed the mediating effect of HRE on the association between SES and brain activation during joint attention, as well as that between SES and language ability. These results suggest that SES contributes to functional development of the prefrontal regions, and the improvement of HRE could be a potential strategy to intervene SES-related disparities on child development.

Decreased Right Prefrontal Synchronization Strength and Asymmetry During Joint Attention in the Left-Behind Children: A Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study.

Although there are millions of left-behind children in China, the researches on brain structure and functions in left-behind children are not sufficient at the brain imaging level. This study aimed to explore whether there is decreased prefrontal synchronization during joint attention in left-behind children. Sixty children (65.12 ± 6.54 months, 29 males) with 34 left-behind children were recruited. The functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) imaging data from the prefrontal cortex during joint attention, as well as behavioral measures (associated with family income, intelligence, language, and social-emotional abilities), were collected. Results verified that brain imaging data and behavioral measures are correlative and support that left-behind children have deficits in social-emotional abilities. More importantly, left-behind children showed decreased synchronization strength and asymmetry in the right middle frontal gyrus during joint attention. The findings suggest that decreased right prefrontal synchronization strength and asymmetry during joint attention might be vulnerability factors in the development of left-behind children.

Is left-behind a real reason for children's social cognition deficit? An fNIRS study on the effect of social interaction on left-behind preschooler's prefrontal activation.

The left-behind phenomenon, caused by parent out-migration, has become a common social issue and might lead to long-term and potential risks for children in rural areas of China. It is important to investigate the effect of social interaction on prefrontal activation of left-behind children in China because of possible effects of parent out-migration on children's social cognition. We recruited 81 rural Chinese preschoolers aged 52-76 months (mean = 64.98 ± 6.321 months) preschoolers with three different statuses of parental out-migration (including non-, partially, and completely left-behind children). Using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), we compared behavior and brain activation and in three groups (non-, partially-, completely-left-behind children) under two different social interaction conditions (child-teacher and child-stranger situation). Results revealed that initiating joint attention (IJA) may evoke higher brain activation than responding to joint attention (RJA) in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), especially in the case of initiating joint attention with the stranger. In addition, the activation of joint attention was positively correlated with children's language score, cognitive flexibility, and facial expression recognition. More importantly, partially-left-behind children evoked higher brain activation in the IJA condition and presented a higher language level than completely/non-left-behind children. The current study provides insight into the neural basis of left-behind children's development and revealed for the first time that family economic level and left-behind status may contribute to the lower social cognition.

Effect of Picture-Book Reading With Additive Audio on Bilingual Preschoolers' Prefrontal Activation: A Naturalistic Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Study.

Acquiring a second language (L2) has the power to shape cognition and even the function and structure of the brain. Picture-book reading with additive audio (PRA) is a popular and convenient means of providing L2 exposure for non-balanced bilingual children; however, its contribution to bilingual children's brain activity is unclear. This study conducted a rigorous bilingual word comprehension experiment and a naturalistic PRA task to explore the effect of L2 processing on brain activation among English as a foreign language (EFL) preschoolers, using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We found that the two contexts of comprehending English words and bilingual switching (BS), which impose more cognitive control demands, activated the prefrontal cortex (PFC) more than did the condition of comprehending Chinese words. Furthermore, the effect of PFC activity in the condition of picture-book reading with additive English audio (English PRA) was also found to be greater than in the condition of picture-book reading with additive Chinese audio (Chinese PRA); moreover, the effect was modulated by story difficulty. Finally, a positive correlation was shown between EFL children's English competence and PFC activation through English PRA. This study indicates that the experiences of hearing L2 auditory stories in a picture-book reading activity yielded significant changes to early bilinguals' PFC functional for cognitive control and language processing.

Effect of English learning experience on young children's prefrontal cortex functioning for attentional control: An fNIRS study.

The exploration concerning effect of bilingualism on cognitive performance has been enriched in recently studies. However, scarce research focused on its impact on the brain function, especially in non-proficient bilingual children. In the present study, both Chinese monolingual and English as a foreign language (EFL) bilingual children were conducted to a non-verbal attentional network task (ANT) by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technique for exploring the consequence of English learning experience on young children's prefrontal regions of functioning attentional control. The behavior results showed that young EFL bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on the accuracy of ANT conflict condition. Furthermore, EFL bilingual children had higher activation in the left prefrontal cortex (inferior frontal gyrus and dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex) than counterpart monolinguals. More interestingly, the degree of bilingual language balance positively correlated with that behavior accuracy and brain activation in bilingual group. These findings provided additional support for the bilingual advantage hypothesis and illustrated implications for understanding how foreign language learning impact children's brain development.

Brain-to-brain synchronization of the expectation of cooperation behavior: A fNIRS hyperscanning study.

Expectation of cooperation (hereafter EOC) plays an important role in social dilemmas. In the present study, participant dyads performed an improved prisoner's dilemma game, with their prefrontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus recorded via the functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning technique. Inter brain results indicated significant inter-brain neural synchronization (INS) across participant pairs' inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in high-powered incentives and defective expectation. Furthermore, the agreeableness proved to be a predictor of cooperative expectation in the inter brain frame. These results may revealed the inter-brain underlying substrate of EOC in social dilemmas and indicated the involvement of the mentalizing network and human mirror neuron system network in social dilemmas.