Investigating the Effect of Intrinsic Motivation on Alpha Desynchronization Using Sample Entropy

The effect of motivation and attention could play an important role in providing personalized learning services and improving learners toward smart education. These effects on brain activity could be quantified by EEG and open the path to analyze the efficiency of services during the learning process. Many studies reported the appearance of EEG alpha desynchronization during the attention period, resulting in better cognitive performance. Motivation was also found to be reflected in EEG. This study investigated the effect of intrinsic motivation on the alpha desynchronization pattern in terms of the complexity of time series data. The sample entropy method was used to quantify the complexity of event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) of EEG data. We found that when participants can remember the stimulus, ERSP was significantly less complex than when they cannot. However, the effect of intrinsic motivation cannot be defined by using sample entropy directly. ERSP’s main effect showed that motivation affects the complexity of ERSP data; longer continuous alpha desynchronization patterns were found when participants were motivated. Therefore, we introduced an algorithm to identify the longest continuous alpha desynchronization pattern. The method allowed us to understand that intrinsic motivation has an effect on recognition at the frontal and left parietal area directly.