title: Characterization of mind wandering using fNIRS.
abstract: Assessing whether someone is attending to a task has become important for educational and professional applications. Such attentional drifts are usually termed mind wandering (MW). The purpose of the current study is to test to what extent a recent neural imaging modality can be used to detect MW episodes. Functional near infrared spectroscopy is a non-invasive neuroimaging technique that has never been used so far to measure MW. We used the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) to assess when subjects attention leaves a primary task. Sixteen-channel fNIRS data were collected over frontal cortices. We observed significant activations over the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) during MW, a brain region associated with the default mode network (DMN). fNIRS data were used to classify MW data above chance level. In line with previous brain-imaging studies, our results confirm the ability of fNIRS to detect Default Network activations in the context of MW.
authors: Département Conception des Véhicules Aérospatiaux, Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace Toulouse, France ; Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition, Universite de Toulouse UPS, Toulouse, France ; CNRS, CerCo Toulouse, France.
authors: Gautier
authors: G
authors: Durantin
authors: Département Conception des Véhicules Aérospatiaux, Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace Toulouse, France.
authors: Frederic
authors: F
authors: Dehais
authors: Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition, Universite de Toulouse UPS, Toulouse, France ; CNRS, CerCo Toulouse, France.
authors: Arnaud
authors: A
authors: Delorme
keywords: default mode network; fNIRS; linear discriminant analysis; mind wandering