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Applying functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in educational research: a systematic review

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Abstract

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has been applied in educational studies during the past decade, arousing tremendous attention, but lack of a systematic review, which prompted this paper to fill the gap. A systematic search with snowball approach identified 99 peer-reviewed journal papers for in-depth content analysis. The findings revealed that considerable attention was devoted to cognitive domain, while a discernible void was observed in the affective domain, accounting for a mere 10.1% of articles. Most participants were aged between 7 and 11 years old, while the adolescents were not sufficiently investigated. Most studies on infants investigated the temporal region, which showed the great potential of fNIRS exploring language function in the younger age group. More wearable or wireless fNIRS devices applied in education suggested its practicability of cognitive evaluation in physical education and skilled training. Finally, this paper proposed potential prospects for future trends adopting fNIRS in education research (e.g., learning science in real educational context, facilitating brain science in early education, learning analytics based on multi-modal data fusion).

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Data Availability

All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].

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Funding

This research was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation in China (62277018; 62237001), the Ministry of Education in China Project of Humanities and Social Sciences (22YJC880106), the Major Project of Social Science in South China Normal University (ZDPY2208), the Degree and graduate education Reform research project in Guangdong (2023JGXM046).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Technology in Education, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China

    Zehui Zhan, Qinchen Yang, Lixia Luo & Xia Zhang

  2. Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences, Ministry of Education, Guangzhou, China

    Zehui Zhan

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  1. Zehui Zhan
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  2. Qinchen Yang
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  3. Lixia Luo
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  4. Xia Zhang
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Contributions

The idea was proposed by [Zehui Zhan] performed the literature search. [Qinchen Yang] has conducted the paper coding, data analysis, and drafted the paper. [Lixia Luo] and [Xia Zhang] also implemented the paper coding. [Zehui Zhan] and [Qinchen Yang] finally revised the work.

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Correspondence to Zehui Zhan.

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This is a review study. The South China Normal University Research Ethics Committee has confirmed that no ethical applroval is required.

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Zhan, Z., Yang, Q., Luo, L. et al. Applying functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in educational research: a systematic review. Curr Psychol 43, 9676–9691 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05094-y

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