This project will develop an open-source pipeline for analyzing functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) data. We will investigate how pleasant and unpleasant sounds modulate activity in auditory and prefrontal brain regions.
During Vanderbilt BrainHack 2026, contributors will help us:
- Develop or refine a workflow to register individualized fNIRS optode coordinates to standardized MNI space.
- Develop or refine a preprocessing pipeline for NIRS signal in the current task.
- Develop or refine statistical analysis and visualization scripts for task-evoked response.
- Explore the feasibility of effective connectivity analyses between prefrontal and auditory regions using fNIRS recordings.
TL ;DR: A dynamic emotional experience is universal for everyday life. Yet, hearing loss may disrupt our emotion perception of sounds. Importantly, improved audibility through the use of hearing aids and cochlear implants do not fully alleviate this disruption. The current project is a first step in the journey to investigate the neural representation of disrupted auditory emotion perception.
Everyday sounds carry rich emotional meaning: birdsong on a morning walk, a newborn’s coo, a favorite piece of music, or the impatient honk of a driver during rush hour. Our emotional responses to sound—the pleasure😁, comfort😌, excitement🤩, or irritation😡 we feel—are an important part of everyday life and well-being[1].
However, behavioral studies in our lab suggest that hearing loss may dampen/compress these responses: our participants with hearing loss rated pleasant sounds as less pleasant, unpleasant sounds as less unpleasant. Importantly, current hearing devices, such as hearing aids and cochlear implants do not fully restore them [2,3]. The neural representation of hearing loss induced compression in emotional response to sound is currently unclear, especially when aided.
Prior neuroimaging studies guided our experimental design[5,6]. We suspect that compressed emotional response is reflected in the prefrontal cortex, auditory cortex, and perhaps the connectivity between the two.
Helpful reads:
- Picou, E. M., & Buono, G. H. (2018). Emotional responses to pleasant sounds are related to social disconnectedness and loneliness independent of hearing loss. Trends in Hearing, 22, 2331216518813243.
- Picou, E. M., Rakita, L., Buono, G. H., & Moore, T. M. (2021). Effects of increasing the overall level or fitting hearing aids on emotional responses to sounds. Trends in hearing, 25, 23312165211049938.
- Tawdrous, M. M., D'Onofrio, K. L., Gifford, R., & Picou, E. M. (2022). Emotional responses to non-speech sounds for hearing-aid and bimodal cochlear-implant listeners. Trends in Hearing, 26, 23312165221083091.
- Satpute, A. B., Kang, J., Bickart, K. C., Yardley, H., Wager, T. D., & Barrett, L. F. (2015). Involvement of sensory regions in affective experience: a meta-analysis. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 1860.
- Plichta, M. M., Gerdes, A. B., Alpers, G. W., Harnisch, W., Brill, S., Wieser, M. J., & Fallgatter, A. J. (2011). Auditory cortex activation is modulated by emotion: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study. Neuroimage, 55(3), 1200-1207.
- Husain, F. T., Carpenter-Thompson, J. R., & Schmidt, S. A. (2014). The effect of mild-to-moderate hearing loss on auditory and emotion processing networks. Frontiers in systems neuroscience, 8, 10.
- 💡💡💡Pinti, P., Tachtsidis, I., Hamilton, A., Hirsch, J., Aichelburg, C., Gilbert, S., & Burgess, P. W. (2020). The present and future use of functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) for cognitive neuroscience. Annals of the new York Academy of Sciences, 1464(1), 5-29. See this paper for an introduction of the physical principles of fNIRS and how it relates to the hemodynamic response that we are trying to measure.
Participants of normal hearing listened to everyday non-speech sounds in a blocked design. Sounds included pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral sounds. Our ROIs include auditory and prefrontal regions. For detailed information, see Analysis
Our hypothesis:
- Relative to neutral sounds, both unpleasant and pleasant sound would elicit greater auditory region activity.
- Similarly, we also expect the prefrontal cortex to show stronger activation to both unpleasant and pleasant sounds, relative to neutral sounds.
- Review the open issues and choose a task.
- Comment on the issue to let us know that you would like to work on it.
- Fork this repository to your GitHub account.
- Create a new branch with a descriptive name.
- Make and test your changes.
- Commit and push your changes to your fork.
- Submit a Pull Request to this repository.
- Link the Pull Request to the corresponding issue.
- Task #0: Self Introduction
- Tasks #1 - #5: See Digitization
- Tasks #6: See Preprocessing
- Tasks #7 - #11: See Analysis
Data could be found here
All contributors will be prominently listed on the project’s primary repository documentation. Outstanding contributions that alter or improve the underlying methodology will be offered formal co-authorship on future academic abstracts or manuscript updates, as appropriate and in accordance with standard scientific authorship and contribution practices.