Recent trends in non-invasive neural recording based brain-to-brain synchrony analysis on multidisciplinary human interactions for understanding brain dynamics: a systematic review

The study of brain-to-brain synchrony has a burgeoning application in the brain-computer interface (BCI) research, offering valuable insights into the neural underpinnings of interacting human brains using numerous neural recording technologies. The area allows exploring the commonality of brain dynamics by evaluating the neural synchronization among a group of people performing a specified task. The growing number of publications on brain-to-brain synchrony inspired the authors to conduct a systematic review using the PRISMA protocol so that future researchers can get a comprehensive understanding of the paradigms, methodologies, translational algorithms, and challenges in the area of brain-to-brain synchrony research. This review has gone through a systematic search with a specified search string and selected some articles based on pre-specified eligibility criteria. The findings from the review revealed that most of the articles have followed the social psychology paradigm, while 36% of the selected studies have an application in cognitive neuroscience. The most applied approach to determine neural connectivity is a coherence measure utilizing phase-locking value (PLV) in the EEG studies, followed by wavelet transform coherence (WTC) in all of the fNIRS studies. While most of the experiments have control experiments as a part of their setup, a small number implemented algorithmic control, and only one study had interventional or a stimulus-induced control experiment to limit spurious synchronization. Hence, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this systematic review solely contributes to critically evaluating the scopes and technological advances of brain-to-brain synchrony to allow this discipline to produce more effective research outcomes in the remote future

Long-term performance deterioration models for semi-rigid asphalt pavement in cold region

As the demand for the semi-rigid asphalt pavement reconstruction and maintenance technologies is increasing in the seasonal cold regions, the pavement performance deterioration models are essential for the success of the reconstruction and maintenance projects. This study is carried out to develop the deterioration models based on the preliminary investigation results of typical successful maintenances. All critical technical indexes concerning the asphalt pavement maintenance were studied. By combining the engineering practices, a long-term performance database of the semi-rigid asphalt pavement was established through a large amount of survey data, and the related environmental parameters. Based on the database achieved, the deterioration models of the semi-rigid asphalt pavement performances were built via the statistical regression method. It is concluded that the proposed deterioration models were useful and practical for the establishment of the maintenance decision of the semi-rigid asphalt pavements