Measuring Brain Activities Related to Understanding Using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS)

We examined brain activation in the frontal cortex during the contents understanding of comic stories with near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). The present results showed that the left prefrontal lobe region is activated when people actively try to understand the comic stories and to memorize their contents for reporting in the future. The activated area could overlap with or be around Broca's area. We discussed how to apply this brain activation related to human understanding to evaluation of contents presented in the human-machine interfaces.