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The World Health Organization regards betel quid (BQ) as a human carcinogen. The BQ chewers may develop dependence symptoms. Although chewing BQ is common in many Asian countries, BQ is still a “populous orphan” in the field of addictive substance. The current review paper systematically reviews the cognitive neuroscientific studies on BQ chewers to understand the chewing effect on cognitive functions and brain. This review includes 25 studies ranged from 1976 to 2019. According to the subjects and study tools, these studies are categorized into “cognitive functions” and “executive control and reward systems.” The “cognitive functions” session includes alertness, selective attention, short-term memory, and executive control. The “executive control and reward systems” session includes the studies that adopted the magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the possible imbalance between the executive control and reward systems. The current review shows that (1) the alertness studies on BQ chewers are few and inconsistent, (2) chewing BQ can affect spatial attention distribution that facilitates target identification, (3) dependent chewers can bias their attention to BQ cues, (4) dependent chewers may have impaired spatial short-term memory, (5) the behavioral studies on executive control are few and inconsistent, (6) imaging studies, in general, show deteriorated executive control in dependent chewers, but show inconsistent patterns on the reward system. The current review discusses several research limitations for future BQ studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Athletic performance is closely related to brain mechanisms. Sport cognitive neuroscience, an area of research utilizing brain imaging tools for the understanding of potential in human motor performance with roots in psychophysiology, has incorporated sport psychology theories and neuroscience techniques to evolve as a distinct research field. Research topics in this field mainly focus on the relationship between neurocognitive processing and athletic performance by recording the neural activity with brain imaging tools, particularly with electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This paper reviews relevant research on sport cognitive neuroscience with an emphasis on work conducted by local researchers. An overview of the evolution and theories of sport cognitive neuroscience is provided, as well as exploration of studies categorized by the cross-sectional and longitudinal design in sport cognitive neuroscience using EEG and fMRI. Lastly, the unresolved issues in the previous studies are discussed, with suggestions for future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]