Affective Stimuli for an Auditory P300 Brain-Computer Interface

Abstract

Gaze-independent brain computer interfaces (BCIs) are a potential communication tool for persons with paralysis. This study applies affective auditory stimuli to investigate their effects using a P300 BCI. Fifteen able-bodied participants operated the P300 BCI, with positive and negative affective sounds (PA: a meowing cat sound, NA: a screaming cat sound). Permuted stimuli of the positive and negative affective sounds (permuted-PA, permuted-NA) were also used for comparison. Electroencephalography data was collected, and offline classification accuracies were compared. We used a visual analog scale (VAS) to measure positive and negative affective feelings in the participants. The mean classification accuracies were 84.7% for PA and 67.3% for permuted-PA, while the VAS scores were 58.5 for PA and −12.1 for permuted-PA. The positive affective stimulus showed significantly higher accuracy and VAS scores than the negative affective stimulus. In contrast, mean classification accuracies were 77.3% for NA and 76.0% for permuted-NA, while the VAS scores were −50.0 for NA and −39.2 for permuted NA, which are not significantly different. We determined that a positive affective stimulus with accompanying positive affective feelings significantly improved BCI accuracy. Additionally, an ALS patient achieved 90% online classification accuracy. These results suggest that affective stimuli may be useful for preparing a practical auditory BCI system for patients with disabilities.

Effect of Different Movement Speed Modes on Human Action Observation: An EEG Study

“…AO stimuli (experiment 1) and MI stimuli (experiment 2) were displayed on a DELL P2314H LCD monitor with a refresh rate of 60 frames/s. Displays were controlled by the psychology software tool “E-Prime 2.0.” The distances between monitor and the subjects were set at 100 cm by following the BCI experimental criterion to prevent other confounding factors in the hMNS activation (Onishi et al, 2017 ). During the entire run of both experiments, a spatially homogeneous gray background with a luminance of 38 cd/m2 was enabled.…”

Comparison of Four Control Methods for a Five-Choice Assistive Technology

“…One method that is being developed to provide such a communication method are non-visual P300 BCIs. The most commonly used modalities are auditory and tactile stimulation (Furdea et al, 2009 ; Brouwer and van Erp, 2010 ; Onishi et al, 2017 ). The principle is the same as for the visual P300 BCIs: the user focuses on stimuli which occur rarely compared to the other stimuli and thus elicits a P300.…”

Neural mechanisms of training an auditory event‐related potential task in a brain–computer interface context

“…Non-visual ERP-BCIs are of particular interest for restoring communication for persons with impaired gaze control or vision (Riccio, Mattia, Simione, Olivetti, & Cincotti, 2012). In addition to paradigms transferring the classical sequential P300 speller design to the auditory domain, with words as stimuli instead of illuminating the rows and columns (Furdea et al, 2009), streaming paradigms were implemented with different auditory stimuli on each ear (Hill & Schölkopf, 2012) or based on affective stimuli (Onishi, Takano, Kawase, Ora, & Kansaku, 2017). In direct comparisons, auditory BCIs allow for similar performance as BCIs based on tactile stimuli (Halder, Takano, & Kansaku, 2018).…”