Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) combined with the detection of event-related brain responses facilitates the selection of relevant information contained in a stream of images presented rapidly to a human. Event related potentials (ERPs) measured non-invasively with electroencephalography (EEG) can be associated with infrequent targets amongst a stream of images. Human-machine symbiosis may be augmented by enabling human interaction with a computer, without overt movement, and/or enable optimization of image/information sorting processes involving humans. Features of the human visual system impact on the success of the RSVP paradigm, but pre-attentive processing supports the identification of target information post presentation of the information by assessing the co-occurrence or time-locked EEG potentials. This paper presents a comprehensive review and evaluation of the limited, but significant, literature on research in RSVP-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Applications that use RSVP-based BCIs are categorized based on display mode and protocol design, whilst a range of factors influencing ERP evocation and detection are analyzed. Guidelines for using the RSVP-based BCI paradigms are recommended, with a view to further standardizing methods and enhancing the inter-relatability of experimental design to support future research and the use of RSVP-based BCIs in practice.

Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) can detect target images among a continuous stream of rapidly presented images, by classifying a viewer's event related potentials (ERPs) associated with the target and non-targets images. Whilst the majority of RSVP-BCI studies to date have concentrated on the identification of a single type of image, namely pictures, here we study the capability of RSVP-BCI to detect three different target image types: pictures, numbers and words. The impact of presentation duration (speed) i.e., 100-200ms (5-10Hz), 200-300ms (3.3-5Hz) or 300-400ms (2.5-3.3Hz), is also investigated. 2-way repeated measure ANOVA on accuracies of detecting targets from non-target stimuli (ratio 1:9) measured via area under the receiver operator characteristics curve (AUC) for N=15 subjects revealed a significant effect of factor Stimulus-Type (pictures, numbers, words) (F (2,28) = 7.243, p = 0.003) and for Stimulus-Duration (F (2,28) = 5.591, p = 0.011). Furthermore, there is an interaction between stimulus type and duration: F (4,56) = 4.419, p = 0.004). The results indicate that when designing RSVP-BCI paradigms, the content of the images and the rate at which images are presented impact on the accuracy of detection and hence these parameters are key experimental variables in protocol design and applications, which apply RSVP for multimodal image datasets.

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The PUFA composition of cell membranes is an important determinant of the biophysical properties of the lipid bilayer and, as a consequence, tissue function. The PUFA composition of plasma lipids differs between men and women (1) . In particular, the concentration of DHA (22 :6n-3) is higher in females than males. It has recently been shown that that the 22 :6n-3 content of hepatic phospholipids is higher in adult female than male rats (2) . The present study has tested the hypothesis that gender differences in membrane phospholipid-PUFA composition are tissue-specific and differ between phospholipid classes.Male and female rats (fifteen per gender) were maintained on a diet based on AIN93M (3) containing 9 g lard and 1 g soyabean oil/100 g feed and were killed on postnatal day 85. Tissues were frozen immediately in liquid N 2 . Total lipids were extracted, phosphatidylcholine (PC) and phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) were purified by solid-phase extraction and fatty acid methyl esters prepared as described previously (4) . The amounts of individual PUFA were determined by GC and expressed as a proportion of nineteen fatty acids. The proportions of specific PUFA in membrane phospholipids differed between genders according to tissue and phospholipid class. Linoleic acid (18 :2n-6) was 27 % lower in heart PC in females than in males. Arachidonic acid (20: 4n-6) was higher in liver (15 %) and heart (12 %) PC in females than in males, but lower in skeletal muscle (SM; 23 %) and adipose tissue (AT; 28 %) PE. 22 :6n-3 was higher in females than in males in liver PC (63 %) and PE (38 %) and in heart PC (21 %). There were no gender differences in the proportions of dihomo-g-linolenic acid (20 :3n-6), g-linolenic acid (18 :3n-3), EPA (20: 5n-3) or docosapentaenoic acid (22: 5n-3) in any phospholipid class or tissue.