NIRx Medical Technologies - Optical Neuroimaging

02/11/2026

🌿 How do brain connectivity and emotional symptoms change during pregnancy?

Thomas et al. (2026) followed a community prenatal-care sample from the first to the third trimester, finding that distress and fear decreased while connectivity increased mainly around left medial prefrontal regions. Using resting-state fNIRS and interviews, they also identified preliminary associations between changes in distress and connectivity, which met only a less stringent statistical correction threshold.

The study adds to our understanding of emotional health and functional brain changes during pregnancy, providing a foundation for further perinatal research.

https://doi.org/10.1111/jne.70252

29/10/2026

🎈 Connecting cognition and movement in autism research

Ayoub et al. (2026) outline a study that will combine virtual reality tasks with simultaneous fNIRS recordings in autistic and non-autistic children aged 8–12. Reaching, popping virtual balloons and responding to task cues will provide movement and performance data alongside measurements of brain haemodynamics.

The first step is to assess whether this approach is tolerable and produces usable data. The protocol sets out a way to study cognition and movement together, with findings still to come.

https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci16090947

26/10/2026

👀 Disentangling neural and physiological contributions to fNIRS signals during active and passive auditory tasks

Shader(2026) compared active word monitoring with passive listening in 11 adults, showing that short-channel correction substantially changed the interpretation of fNIRS responses. Negative active-task HbO estimates became positive, and several apparent differences between tasks disappeared after correction, indicating contributions from superficial physiology.

The study highlights why physiological monitoring and signal correction matter when studying speech processing during tasks that require a response.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-69046-9

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