Abstract:   Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a neuroimaging tool used to measure changes in the concentration of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin in the brain associated with neural activity. fNIRS has proven to be a useful tool in auditory neuroimaging experiments, both in passive listening and active response experimental designs. Passive listening tasks are chosen to avoid the introduction of noise to the data, whereas active response tasks are chosen as a more ecological assessment of listening and communication. However, it is not clear as to which type of task results in better estimation of the underlying auditory-evoked neural activity. This study aims to investigate the differences in evoked activity measured by fNIRS between passive listening tasks and active response tasks. Additionally, results are compared before and after controlling for systemic physiology signals (heart rate, blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), photoplethysmography (PPG), and respiration) to investigate the effects these signals have on the measured changes in hemoglobin concentration and whether those effects differ between passive vs active tasks. 

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