Haley and Courtney (savvy lab doc students) presented pilot data for a project about using speaking and listening tasks to screen potential functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) participants. fNIRS is the tool we use to estimate brain activation. Some individuals (like Eric) are “suboptimal” fNIRS participants due to various reasons, e.g., hair color or type, skull density, etc. Because we are typically interested in brain activation during speech or speech-related tasks, we want a procedure to minimize the number of suboptimal participants because these participants introduce noise into our data which makes analysis difficult and also may mask real effects. Great work, Haley and Courtney
