Mental workload during n-back task captured by TransCranial Doppler (TCD) sonography and functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) monitoring

The authors used this dataset to assess the neurovascular coupling responses
evoked by a cognitive paradigm with the aid of TransCranial Doppler (TCD)
sonography and functional Near-InfraRed Spectroscopy (fNIRS). Fourteen healthy
young individuals were recruited for this study conducted in 2018 at the
University of Oklahoma, Translational Geroscience Laboratory (age: 31±5.94
years, BMI: 24.9±2.95). The following physiological signals were measured non-
invasively during the examination: relative concentration of oxy- and
deoxyhemoglobin (HbO and HbR, respectively), and cerebral Blood Flow Velocity
(BFV) in the middle cerebral arteries for the entire duration of the testing
(~11 minutes). In this study, fNIRS signals from the frontal cortex were
acquired by a NIRScout platform (NIRx Medical Technologies LLC, NY, USA) at a
sampling frequency of 3.9 Hz, HbO and HbR time series signals can be obtained
by applying the differential modified Beer Lambert Law on the preprocessed
records of near-infrared intensities. BFV was recorded using TCD sonography
(Digi-Lite, Rimed, Raanana, Israel) by placing 2 Mhz ultrasound probes over
the left and right temporal acoustic windows. The paradigm used for cognitive
testing was an n-back task where the participant was administered a series of
alphabetical letters on the computer screen and had to provide a response
whenever a stimulus is presented that is the same as the one presented _n_
trials previously. The examination protocol consisted of the following 134
second sessions: 0-back, 1-back, 0-back, and 2-back. This dataset was
collected for the following study: "Increased Cognitive Workload Evokes
Greater Neurovascular Coupling Responses in Healthy Young Adults".