A Complex Network-Based Study of Brain Attentional Mechanisms Under Thermal Comfort Environment

A large number of studies have shown that humans have better cognitive abilities in thermal comfort environments, however, the intrinsic mechanisms of how thermal environments affect cognitive processes in the brain are not clear. Attention is an important cognitive ability of the brain, and we propose that one of the ways in which thermal comfort environments improve cognitive abilities such as attention is by optimizing the expression patterns of brain networks, making them more favorable for cognitive processes. Therefore, in order to test this hypothesis, this paper investigates the response patterns of brain networks induced by attention by designing the standard attention GO-NO-GO experiments under different thermal comfort environments and combining electroencephalography (EEG) technology with the use of functional connectivity and multiscale entropy (MSE). It was found that the more comfortable temperature environment first induced network connectivity enhancement in the prefrontal and parietal local regions of the brain network during the attentional task onset, which represent the higher cognitive efficiency for accomplishing attention task. This study not only reveals the neural mechanisms underlying temperature-induced cognitive modulation, but also offers promising directions for real-world applications in neuroergonomics and intelligent environmental control.