Feedback Related Potentials for EEG-Based Typing Systems

Error related potentials (ErrP), which are elicited in the EEG in response to a perceived error, have been used for error correction and adaption in the event related potential (ERP)-based brain computer interfaces designed for typing. In these typing interfaces, ERP evidence is collected in response to a sequence of stimuli presented usually in the visual form and the intended user stimulus is probabilistically inferred (stimulus with highest probability) and presented to the user as the decision. If the inferred stimulus is incorrect, ErrP is expected to be elicited in the EEG. Early approaches to use ErrP in the design of typing interfaces attempt to make hard decisions on the perceived error such that the perceived error is corrected and either the sequence of stimuli are repeated to obtain further ERP evidence, or without further repetition the stimulus with the second highest probability is presented to the user as the decision of the system. Moreover, none of the existing approaches use a language model to increase the performance of typing. In this work, unlike the existing approaches, we study the potential benefits of fusing feedback related potentials (FRP), a form of ErrP, with ERP and context information (language model, LM) in a Bayesian fashion to detect the user intent. We present experimental results based on data from 12 healthy participants using RSVP Keyboard™ to complete a copy-phrase-task. Three paradigms are compared: [P1] uses only ERP/LM Bayesian fusion; [P2] each RSVP sequence is appended with the top candidate in the alphabet according to posterior after ERP evidence fusion; corresponding FRP is then incorporated; and [P3] the top candidate is shown as a prospect to generate FRP evidence only if its posterior exceeds a threshold. Analyses indicate that ERP/LM/FRP evidence fusion during decision making yields significant speed-accuracy benefits for the user.