Objective. The use of an electroencephalogram (EEG) anticipation-related component, the expectancy wave (E-wave), in brain–machine interaction was proposed more than 50 years ago. This possibility was not explored for decades, but recently it was shown that voluntary attempts to select items using eye fixations, but not spontaneous eye fixations, are accompanied by the E-wave. Thus, the use of the E-wave detection was proposed for the enhancement of gaze interaction technology, which has a strong need for a mean to decide if a gaze behavior is voluntary or not. Here, we attempted at estimating whether this approach can be used in the context of moving object selection through smooth pursuit eye movements. Approach. Eighteen participants selected, one by one, items which moved on a computer screen, by gazing at them. In separate runs, the participants performed tasks not related to voluntary selection but also provoking smooth pursuit. A low-cost consumer-grade eye tracker was used for item selection. Main results. A component resembling the E-wave was found in the averaged EEG segments time-locked to voluntary selection events of every participant. Linear discriminant analysis with shrinkage regularization classified the intentional and spontaneous smooth pursuit eye movements, using single-trial 300 ms long EEG segments, significantly above chance in eight participants. When the classifier output was averaged over ten subsequent data segments, median group ROC AUC of 0.75 was achieved. Significance. The results suggest the possible usefulness of the E-wave detection in the gaze-based selection of moving items, e.g. in video games. This technique might be more effective when trial data can be averaged, thus it could be considered for use in passive interfaces, for example, in estimating the degree of the user’s involvement during gaze-based interaction.

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Voice- and gaze-based hands-free input are increasingly used in human-machine interaction. Attempts to combine them into a hybrid technology typically employ the voice channel as an information-rich channel. Voice seems to be “overqualified” to serve simply as a substitute of a computer mouse click, to confirm selections made by gaze. It could be expected that the user would feel discomfort if they had to frequently make “clicks” using their voice, or easily get bored, which also could lead to low performance. To test this, we asked 23 healthy participants to select moving objects with smooth pursuit eye movements. Manual confirmation of selection was faster and rated as more convenient than voice-based confirmation. However, the difference was not high, especially when voice was used to pronounce objects’ numbers (speech recognition was not applied): Score of convenience (M ± SD) was 9.2 ± 1.1 for manual and 8.0 ± 2.1 for voice confirmation, and time spent per object was 1269 ± 265 ms and 1626 ± 331 ms, respectively. We conclude that “voice-as-click” can be used to confirm selection in gaze-based interaction with computers as a substitute for the computer mouse click when manual confirmation cannot be used.

Sense of agency (SoA) refers to an individual’s awareness of their own actions. SoA studies seek to find objective indicators for the feeling of agency. These indicators, being related to the feeling of control, have practical application in vehicle design. However, they have not been investigated for actions related to the agent’s body movement inherent to steering a vehicle. In our study, participants operated a robotic wheelchair under three conditions: active control by a participant, direct control by the experimenter and remote control by the experimenter. In each trial, a participant drove the wheelchair until a sound signal occurred, after which they stopped the wheelchair and estimated the travelled distance. The subjective estimates were significantly greater when participants operated the wheelchair by themselves. This result contrasts with observations under static settings in previous studies. In an additional study on the electroencephalographic response to a sound presented at a random time after movement onset, the observed latencies in the N1 component implied that participants might have a higher sense of control when they drove the wheelchair. The proposed methodology might become useful to indirectly assess the degree of operator control of a vehicle, primarily in the field of rehabilitation technologies.