Effects of Distracting Task with Different Mental Workload on Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential Based Brain Computer Interfaces—an Offline Study

Abstract

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), independent of the brain's normal output pathways, are attracting an increasing amount of attention as devices that extract neural information. As a typical type of BCI system, the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based BCIs possess a high signal-to-noise ratio and information transfer rate. However, the current high speed SSVEP-BCIs were implemented with subjects concentrating on stimuli, and intentionally avoided additional tasks as distractors. This paper aimed to investigate how a distracting simultaneous task, a verbal n-back task with different mental workload, would affect the performance of SSVEP-BCI. The results from fifteen subjects revealed that the recognition accuracy of SSVEP-BCI was significantly impaired by the distracting task, especially under a high mental workload. The average classification accuracy across all subjects dropped by 8.67% at most from 1- to 4-back, and there was a significant negative correlation (maximum r = −0.48, p < 0.001) between accuracy and subjective mental workload evaluation of the distracting task. This study suggests a potential hindrance for the SSVEP-BCI daily use, and then improvements should be investigated in the future studies.

A Cross-Sectional Study Using Wireless Electrocardiogram to Investigate Physical Workload of Wheelchair Control in Real World Environments

“…Wheelchair control is a complicated motor task that increases both the cognitive (or mental) and physical workload of an individual [18]. Cognitive workload (CW) refers to the limited information processing capacity of the brain demanded by a task or environment [19].…”

Brain-Controlled, AR-Based Home Automation System Using SSVEP-Based Brain-Computer Interface and EOG-Based Eye Tracker: A Feasibility Study for the Elderly End User

“…Moreover, the BCI performance might be affected by the circumstance of the online experiment because the participants had to complete the pre-instructed task based on their own decision when a false operation occurred. Indeed, the degradation of BCI performance due to an increased cognitive workload has been frequently reported [31].…”

Exploring the effects of head movements and accompanying gaze fixation switch on steady-state visual evoked potential

“…Tracking a ball by moving the head required more cognitive effort and sensory engagement in processing the changing visual scene. A former study showed that the SSVEP accompanied by a simultaneous memory task could induce performance deterioration ( Zhao et al, 2018 ). Lin et al (2014) found that the alpha-rhythm could be inhibited by increasing visual processing during walking.…”