NIRx Medical Technologies - Optical Neuroimaging

23/10/2026

🧸 New words, different learning patterns for bilinguals

Arredondo and Weatherhead (2026) studied how 60 monolingual and bilingual toddlers linked unfamiliar words with objects, using eye tracking and fNIRS together. During the English-language task, monolingual toddlers reliably made these connections, while bilingual toddlers showed greater right temporal brain activity during disambiguation; neither group reliably retained the new words.

Recording where toddlers look alongside their brain responses helps researchers understand how children with different language experiences approach word learning.

https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.70272

21/10/2026

💡🫩 Understanding changes in cognitive fatigue

Haroon et al. (2026) studied prefrontal fNIRS signals in 20 adults before and after mechanical massage combined with binaural auditory stimulation, reporting a peak accuracy of 97.25% when classifying fatigued and post-intervention states. Their framework combined temporal signal features, nonlinear dynamics and deep learning, with explainability tools showing which channels contributed to predictions.

The findings offer an early research direction for interpretable fatigue assessment, with larger studies needed to establish how well the approach generalises.

https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3729486

19/10/2026

New research on the developing social brain!

da Silva Soares Junior and Sato (2026) recorded brain activity simultaneously in 15 pairs of children during a Tangram task, finding greater manual activity during collaboration but no significant difference in global inter-brain coupling across conditions. An exploratory link between coupling and manual engagement did not survive correction for multiple comparisons.

The study shows how fNIRS hyperscanning can bring neuroscience into naturalistic, hands-on activities while encouraging careful interpretation of the relationship between synchrony and collaboration.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-026-03187-5

16/10/2026

👨‍👧 How does a child’s experience of empathy compare with what their parent perceives?

Katz et al. (2026) recorded brain activity simultaneously in 26 parent-child pairs using fNIRS and found that positive storytelling increased emotional empathy, with parents rating their children’s empathy higher than children rated themselves. These perspectives were associated with partly different interbrain synchrony patterns, offering insight into empathy during naturalistic family interactions.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2026.109375

09/10/2026

The first year of life is a critical period for language development. 👶🗣️

Piatti et al. (2026) used fNIRS to compare neural responses to voices and emotional prosody in 8–10-month-old infants exposed to severe maternal mental illness and unexposed controls.

Exposed infants showed a different pattern of right-temporal activation, with stronger responses to non-voice than voice sounds. Socioeconomic status was also associated with infants’ neural responses, highlighting the broader context shaping early development.

The findings show how fNIRS can help researchers investigate subtle differences in language-related cortical processing during infancy, before clear behavioural difficulties emerge.

Read the full study here:
https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-026-00475-y

Brain responses to voice differ at 9 months in infants born to mothers with severe mental illness. Socioeconomic status also relates to how infants process sounds, suggesting multiple early factors associated with language development.

07/10/2026

Emotional interference may be particularly sensitive to differences associated with short-term cannabis abstinence. 🌿💭

Castaño Castaño et al. (2026) studied non-users, occasional cannabis users, and chronic users using cognitive tasks alongside fNIRS.

Following 72 hours of self-reported abstinence in the cannabis-use groups, behavioural effects were concentrated in the Emotional Stroop task. fNIRS analyses also identified differences over time between groups in right- and bilateral-prefrontal haemodynamics.

As a small proof-of-concept study, the findings are preliminary, but they offer an interesting direction for studying the relationship between cannabis-use patterns, abstinence and cognitive-affective control.

Read the full study here:
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1873912

IntroductionCannabis use has been linked to alterations in cognitive control and emotional processing, although findings vary according to use pattern and ab...

05/10/2026

How might exercise influence cognitive control in problematic social media use? 🏃🔗

Zhang et al. (2026) compared the acute effects of high-intensity interval training, moderate-intensity continuous training and a control condition in 54 college students.

Using fNIRS during a social cue-embedded Go/NoGo task, the researchers found that HIIT improved reaction time relative to control and produced broader changes in prefrontal network organisation. These included stronger connectivity centred on the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

The study provides an interesting perspective on how acute exercise and cognitive performance can be studied at the level of functional brain networks.

Read the full study here:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesf.2026.200502

02/10/2026

Treatment effects in narcolepsy may extend across both sleep and task-related cortical haemodynamics. 🌙💊

Mao et al. (2026) studied 16 drug-naive people with narcolepsy type 1 before and after combination medication treatment using sleep assessments and fNIRS during cognitive tasks.

Treatment was associated with changes in sleep architecture and significant cortical haemodynamic changes during verbal fluency, but not during the Go/NoGo task. Selected fNIRS measures also predicted post-treatment sleep latency.

While these pilot findings require validation in larger controlled cohorts, they point to an interesting role for fNIRS in studying treatment-related changes alongside established sleep measures.

Read the full study here:
https://doi.org/10.2147/NSS.S612135

30/09/2026

How can high-quality fNIRS measurements and exercise research work side by side? 🚴📈

Debertshaeuser et al. (2026) tested an fNIRS protocol measuring prefrontal haemodynamics during n-back tasks before and after low-, moderate- and high-intensity cycling.

In this exploratory study, nine participants completed the protocol, with a mean scalp coupling index of 0.964 and strong agreement between two data-quality approaches. Behavioural performance and prefrontal haemodynamics also varied with n-back load.

The findings provide useful methodological groundwork for bringing fNIRS into exercise and cognition research, while identifying practical considerations for future protocols.

Read the full study here:

IntroductionWhile previous research has shown that single bouts of acute exercise can enhance cognitive performance, the physiological mechanisms behind this...

28/09/2026

Posture can influence both cognition and cerebral haemodynamics in Parkinson’s disease. 🧍📊

Longardner et al. (2026) studied people with Parkinson’s disease with and without orthostatic hypotension as they completed a verbal fluency task while lying down and upright.

When upright, participants with orthostatic hypotension performed worse and showed altered haemodynamics in the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Yet none experienced orthostatic symptoms during testing.

The study points to the potential of fNIRS for monitoring posture-related cerebral dysfunction alongside cognitive performance in clinical research.

Read the full study here:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinph.2026.2112351