A pre-NIRS study of background colour effects on the functions of the frontal lobe

Abstract

Some studies have pointed out that tablet computers can be used to enhance people‘s daily life and to strengthen their brain‘s cognitive ability. In this study, the authors conducted an experiment with elderly people as subjects in order to investigate whether different screen background colours can enhance their brain functions when performing a task on a tablet computer. In total, 17 elderly Japanese subjects participated in the experiment. We recorded haemoglobin concentration changes in the frontal lobe of the subject’s brain by using a near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), while the subject performed circle counting task (CCT) and reading span task (RST) in the experiment. Each subject performed both tasks on five different background colours, which were white, blue, yellow, red, and green. All the task pages were designed in the same way for each background colour, and the order of colours were arranged randomly. As for the average scores of CCT from all the subjects, the yellow background showed the highest score while the white background showed the lowest score. However, as for the average RST scores, the score for the white background was higher than other background colours. The results indicated that the brains of the subjects received more stress while they were performing CCT on the white background whereas for RST the subjects may have already been used to the white background of a tablet screen and performed better. Brain functions should be analysed in further analysis since CCT requires attention, whereas effect of the background colours on the brain may be different from RST, which focuses on working memory.