A stochastic control approach to optimally designing hierarchical flash sets in P300 communication prostheses

Post-stimulus encoding of decision confidence in EEG: toward a brain-computer interface for decision making

Objective.When making decisions, humans can evaluate how likely they are to be correct. If this subjective confidence could be reliably decoded from brain activity, it would be possible to build a brain-computer interface (BCI) that improves decision performance by automatically providing more information to the user if needed based on their confidence. But this possibility depends on whether confidence can be decoded right after stimulus presentation and before the response so that a corrective action can be taken in time. Although prior work has shown that decision confidence is represented in brain signals, it is unclear if the representation is stimulus-locked or response-locked, and whether stimulus-locked pre-response decoding is sufficiently accurate for enabling such a BCI.Approach.We investigate the neural correlates of confidence by collecting high-density electroencephalography (EEG) during a perceptual decision task with realistic stimuli. Importantly, we design our task to include a post-stimulus gap that prevents the confounding of stimulus-locked activity by response-locked activity and vice versa, and then compare with a task without this gap.Main results.We perform event-related potential and source-localization analyses. Our analyses suggest that the neural correlates of confidence are stimulus-locked, and that an absence of a post-stimulus gap could cause these correlates to incorrectly appear as response-locked. By preventing response-locked activity from confounding stimulus-locked activity, we then show that confidence can be reliably decoded from single-trial stimulus-locked pre-response EEG alone. We also identify a high-performance classification algorithm by comparing a battery of algorithms. Lastly, we design a simulated BCI framework to show that the EEG classification is accurate enough to build a BCI and that the decoded confidence could be used to improve decision making performance particularly when the task difficulty and cost of errors are high.Significance.Our results show feasibility of non-invasive EEG-based BCIs to improve human decision making.

Adaptive Sequence-Based Stimulus Selection in an ERP-Based Brain-Computer Interface by Thompson Sampling in a Multi-Armed Bandit Problem

A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is a device that interprets brain activity to help people with disabilities communicate. The P300 ERP-based BCI speller displays a series of events on the screen and searches the elicited electroencephalogram (EEG) data for target P300 event-related potential (ERP) responses among a series of non-target events. The Checkerboard (CB) paradigm is a common stimulus presentation paradigm. Although a few studies have proposed data-driven methods for stimulus selection, they suffer from intractable decision rules, large computation complexity, or error propagation for participants who perform poorly under the static paradigm. In addition, none of the methods have been applied to the CB paradigm directly. In this work, we propose a sequence-based adaptive stimulus selection method using Thompson Sampling in the multi-bandit problem with multiple actions. During each sequence, the algorithm selects a random subset of stimuli with fixed size, aiming to identify all target stimuli and to improve the spelling speed by reducing the number of unnecessary non-target stimuli. We compute "clean" stimulus-specific rewards from raw classifier scores via the Bayes rule. We perform extensive simulation studies to compare our algorithm to the static CB paradigm. We show the robustness of our algorithm by considering the constraints of practical use. For scenarios where simulated data resemble the real data the most, the spelling efficiency of our algorithm increases by more than 70%, compared to the static CB paradigm.

Noninvasive brain-computer interfaces for augmentative and alternative communication

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) promise to provide a novel access channel for assistive technologies, including augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems, to people with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI). Research on the subject has been accelerating significantly in the last decade and the research community took great strides toward making BCI-AAC a practical reality to individuals with SSPI. Nevertheless, the end goal has still not been reached and there is much work to be done to produce real-world-worthy systems that can be comfortably, conveniently, and reliably used by individuals with SSPI with help from their families and care givers who will need to maintain, setup, and debug the systems at home. This paper reviews reports in the BCI field that aim at AAC as the application domain with a consideration on both technical and clinical aspects.

An SSVEP-Based Brain-Computer Interface for Text Spelling With Adaptive Queries That Maximize Information Gain Rates

This paper presents a brain-computer interface for text entry using steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP). Like other SSVEP-based spellers, ours identifies the desired input character by posing questions (or queries) to users through a visual interface. Each query defines a mapping from possible characters to steady-state stimuli. The user responds by attending to one of these stimuli. Unlike other SSVEP-based spellers, ours chooses from a much larger pool of possible queries-on the order of ten thousand instead of ten. The larger query pool allows our speller to adapt more effectively to the inherent structure of what is being typed and to the input performance of the user, both of which make certain queries provide more information than others. In particular, our speller chooses queries from this pool that maximize the amount of information to be received per unit of time, a measure of mutual information that we call information gain rate. To validate our interface, we compared it with two other state-of-the-art SSVEP-based spellers, which were re-implemented to use the same input mechanism. Results showed that our interface, with the larger query pool, allowed users to spell multiple-word texts nearly twice as fast as they could with the compared spellers.

Stochastic optimal control as a theory of brain-machine interface operation

The closed-loop operation of brain-machine interfaces (BMI) provides a framework to study the mechanisms behind neural control through a restricted output channel, with emerging clinical applications to stroke, degenerative disease, and trauma. Despite significant empirically driven improvements in closed-loop BMI systems, a fundamental, experimentally validated theory of closed-loop BMI operation is lacking. Here we propose a compact model based on stochastic optimal control to describe the brain in skillfully operating canonical decoding algorithms. The model produces goal-directed BMI movements with sensory feedback and intrinsically noisy neural output signals. Various experimentally validated phenomena emerge naturally from this model, including performance deterioration with bin width, compensation of biased decoders, and shifts in tuning curves between arm control and BMI control. Analysis of the model provides insight into possible mechanisms underlying these behaviors, with testable predictions. Spike binning may erode performance in part from intrinsic control-dependent constraints, regardless of decoding accuracy. In compensating decoder bias, the brain may incur an energetic cost associated with action potential production. Tuning curve shifts, seen after the mastery of a BMI-based skill, may reflect the brain's implementation of a new closed-loop control policy. The direction and magnitude of tuning curve shifts may be altered by decoder structure, ensemble size, and the costs of closed-loop control. Looking forward, the model provides a framework for the design and simulated testing of an emerging class of BMI algorithms that seek to directly exploit the presence of a human in the loop.