Frontal cortex neural activities shift cognitive resources away from facial activities in real-time problem solving

Abstract

Extracting mental and task performance state-information from a human in real time is a challenging scientific endeavour. In this paper, we attempt to understand if there is a relationship between the frontal cortex activities in the F3 and F4 positions according to the 10-20 international system of electrode placement, which are known to correlate with executive control functions and working memory, and facial muscle activities. We demonstrate that in a highly demanding control, planning and problem solving task, as the human gets more engaged in the task, there is a consistent increase of correlation between the frontal cortex activities, an anti correlation between the cheeks and forehead muscles, and that the two correlations are perfectly anti-correlated with each other. The results suggest a resource shifting occurring during the task as the task progresses and the complexity of the task increases. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.