Neural Noise

fNIRS and sport viewership experience

2 min read

  • Functional near-infrared spectroscopy has been used to study the sport viewership experience (Scientific Reports, April 2025).1
  • The work provides fNIRS methods context in a behavioral/consumer application rather than BCI.1 1

Weekly enrichment (2026-07-20)

  • The paper (Potwarka, Safati, Pappas et al., Scientific Reports 2025, vol. 15, article 13374; DOI 10.1038/s41598-025-96895-7) is a proof-of-principle feasibility study; 20 young adults (n = 11 high, n = 9 low ego involvement) were selected from an initial pre-screened sample of 343 undergraduates.2 3
  • Cortical activity was recorded with an fNIR Devices unit 203c forehead band carrying 4 light sources and 8 detectors (up to 16 channels) at a 5 Hz sampling rate, with oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) as the primary metric of prefrontal activation.2 3
  • Participants viewed roughly a 25-minute clip (the first 20-minute period) of an Elite Ice Hockey League (United Kingdom) game, and hemodynamic responses were analyzed over the 10 s following each of 12 a-priori key moments (scoring chances and offensive faceoff opportunities).2 3
  • Signal processing used a median filter (window size 25) to remove motion artifacts and a 0.1 Hz low-pass filter for physiological noise, with hemodynamics computed via the modified Beer-Lambert law; regions of interest were left lateral PFC (channels 3,4,6), left dmPFC (5,7,8), right dmPFC (9–11), and right lateral PFC (12–14).2 3
  • Viewers with high ego involvement showed significantly greater HbO in the right dorsomedial prefrontal cortex following key moments (t(146) = 3.24, p = .002), and both left and right dmPFC were especially responsive to offensive faceoff opportunities.2 3
  • Ego involvement was quantified with a 15-item scale (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.959) covering the sport’s centrality, social bonding, and identity affirmation, used to split participants into high and low groups.2
  • The authors interpret elevated dmPFC activation as consistent with that region’s role in personally relevant, self-evaluative social processing among emotionally invested fans.2 3
  • Context/caveat: this is a consumer-neuroscience (sport-marketing) application rather than a BCI, and it is limited by a small sample; mobile fNIRS also images only ~2 cm of cortex and cannot reach deep reward/emotion structures such as the amygdala or nucleus accumbens, bounding what prefrontal HbO can reveal.4

Footnotes

  1. https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiX0FVX3lxTE5kbG5fbi1JR1drWDdkRU85UzNDdWdWU3pJU1hNZHZUMlRpTmNlT09valkwZ0pKdGduYjZsNUh6VkM4VklHal9aV3c5cmI3Y21oSm44UWhQWlV4V2FoU3o0?oc=5 ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-96895-7 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12008266/ ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  4. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6222120/ ↩

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