Correlates of Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Brain–Computer Interface Accuracy in a Multi-Class Personalization Framework

Brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) provide individuals with a means of interacting with a computer using only neural activity. To date, the majority of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) BCIs have used prescribed tasks to achieve binary control. The goals of this study were to evaluate the possibility of using a personalized approach to establish control of a two-, three-, four-, and five-class NIRS–BCI, and to explore how various user characteristics correlate to accuracy. Ten able-bodied participants were recruited for five data collection sessions. Participants performed six mental tasks and a personalized approach was used to select each individual’s best discriminating subset of tasks. The average offline cross-validation accuracies achieved were 78, 61, 47, and 37% for the two-, three-, four-, and five-class problems, respectively. Most notably, all participants exceeded an accuracy of 70% for the two-class problem, and two participants exceeded an accuracy of 70% for the three-class problem. Additionally, accuracy was found to be strongly positively correlated (Pearson’s) with perceived ease of session (ρ = 0.653), ease of concentration (ρ = 0.634), and enjoyment (ρ = 0.550), but strongly negatively correlated with verbal IQ (ρ = −0.749).