Condy Emma E, Miguel Helga O, Millerhagen John, Harrison Doug, Khaksari Kosar, Fox Nathan, Gandjbakhche Amir
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, United States.
Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2021 Feb 18;15:627983. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.627983. eCollection 2021.
Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a neuroimaging technique that has undergone tremendous growth over the last decade due to methodological advantages over other measures of brain activation. The action-observation network (AON), a system of brain structures proposed to have "mirroring" abilities (e.g., active when an individual completes an action or when they observe another complete that action), has been studied in humans through neural measures such as fMRI and electroencephalogram (EEG); however, limitations of these methods are problematic for AON paradigms. For this reason, fNIRS is proposed as a solution to investigating the AON in humans. The present review article briefly summarizes previous neural findings in the AON and examines the state of AON research using fNIRS in adults. A total of 14 fNIRS articles are discussed, paying particular attention to methodological choices and considerations while summarizing the general findings to aid in developing better protocols to study the AON through fNIRS. Additionally, future directions of this work are discussed, specifically in relation to researching AON development and potential multimodal imaging applications.
功能近红外光谱技术（fNIRS）是一种神经成像技术，在过去十年中得到了巨大发展，这得益于其相对于其他脑激活测量方法的方法学优势。动作观察网络（AON）是一个被认为具有“镜像”能力的脑结构系统（例如，当个体完成一个动作或观察另一个人完成该动作时会被激活），人们已经通过功能磁共振成像（fMRI）和脑电图（EEG）等神经测量方法对其进行了研究；然而，这些方法的局限性对于AON范式来说是个问题。因此，fNIRS被提议作为研究人类AON的一种解决方案。本综述文章简要总结了先前在AON方面的神经学研究结果，并探讨了在成年人中使用fNIRS进行AON研究的现状。共讨论了14篇fNIRS相关文章，在总结总体研究结果时特别关注方法学选择和考量因素，以帮助制定更好的方案，通过fNIRS研究AON。此外，还讨论了这项工作的未来方向，特别是与研究AON发育和潜在的多模态成像应用相关的方向。
