Development Of Experiment Software In Near-infrared Brain Functional Instrument

The near-infrared brain functional instrument is an important approach to research the working memory in human brain .It is a noninvasive optical approach to detect the prefrontal cortex which is one of the key cortex in different working memory processes. Working memory model refers to a mental system that provides temporary storage and manipulation of the information. Working memory is necessary for the high level cognitive tasks such as language, learning and consequence. In order to apply the system to practice, the experiment software has been developed.In this thesis, we choose the storage and the manipulation of the working memory, and two experiments each. The four experiments are: item recognition experiment of verbal and spatial storage working memory, digit span experiment of digit storage working memory, the Chinese words encoding experiment of language manipulation, the mental arithmetic experiment of arithmetic manipulation. We designed the four experiments paradigm to the near-infrared spectroscopy imaging system. The Visual C++ was adopted to program the experiment procedure. The program presents the task according to the paradigm, meanwhile records the behavior data of the experiment.We use the near-infrared brain functional instrument. And we analyze the oxyhemoglobin data and the behavior data. According to the behavior and the measurement results of the experiments, the four paradigms designed activated prominent response in the prefrontal cortex. Separate discussion of the response data lead to a result where the tasks'basic response area in the prefrontal cortex is. The result of the item recognition experiment suggest that the verbal working memory's response area is left prefrontal cortex(BA9,10,46), while the spatial working memory's is right prefrontal cortex(BA9,10,46). The result of the digit span experiment suggest that forward and backward digit span's response area are different. The result of the Chinese words encoding experiment suggest that the response area of Chinese words encoding is left prefrontal cortex(BA10,46). The result of the mental arithmetic experiment suggest that different response areas are found when task's difficulty changed. Integrative discussion of the response data suggest that different function means different mechanism and different response area, and different response areas are found when task's difficulty changed. In conclusion, experiment software in near-infrared brain functional instrument has been developed and is proved to be correct.