Neural Noise- Naturalistic fNIRS assessment in college students reveals decline in executive function following social media use.1
- Prefrontal hemodynamics and activation are altered after social media use.1
- fNIRS in ecologically valid settings supports portable neuroimaging and BCI-adjacent assessment.1 1
Weekly enrichment (2026-07-20)
- The underlying study was published in Scientific Reports (Nature, 2025, doi 10.1038/s41598-025-20844-7) and used a wearable, naturalistic functional near-infrared spectroscopy system to measure prefrontal oxygenated-hemoglobin activity during everyday behavior.2
- Twenty college-student participants completed executive-function tasks and self-report questionnaires both before and after a brief social media session, split into a social media use group and a control group.2 3
- Over half of participants (55%) met criteria for social media addiction, with average self-reported Instagram usage of about five hours per week.2
- The authors frame the significance with usage statistics: as of 2023, 69% of U.S. adults and 81% of U.S. teens use social media regularly.2
- Behaviorally, social media exposure reduced accuracy on executive-function tasks including the n-back working-memory paradigm and the Go/No-Go inhibition paradigm.2
- Neurally, social media use increased medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activation—interpreted as greater cognitive effort and performance monitoring—while decreasing dorsolateral (dlPFC) and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) activation, consistent with impaired working memory and inhibition.2
- Reduced inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) activation was specifically linked to difficulty suppressing motor responses to No-Go stimuli, and reported effect sizes were sizeable (e.g., combined 2-back/3-back working-memory contrasts with Cohen’s d up to about 1.1), while emotional changes were modest (mainly slightly lower happiness in the control group).2 3
- The work was NIH-funded (multiple NIA and NIMH grants, e.g., R01 AG072470 and R61 MH119289) and is positioned as a demonstration that wearable fNIRS can enable real-world brain monitoring to inform precision mental-health interventions targeting digital behavior—relevant to fNIRS-based BCI and neurofeedback.4 2