Michalareas Georgios, Rudwan Ismat M A, Lehr Claudia, Gessini Paolo, Tavano Alessandro, Grabenhorst Matthias
Department of Cognitive Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, Germany.
Mars Space Ltd, UK.
Heliyon. 2023 Oct 13;9(10):e20725. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e20725. eCollection 2023 Oct.
The neural mechanisms that unfold when humans form a large group defined by an overarching context, such as audiences in theater or sports, are largely unknown and unexplored. This is mainly due to the lack of availability of a scalable system that can record the brain activity from a significantly large portion of such an audience simultaneously. Although the technology for such a system has been readily available for a long time, the high cost as well as the large overhead in human resources and logistic planning have prohibited the development of such a system. However, during the recent years reduction in technology costs and size have led to the emergence of low-cost, consumer-oriented EEG systems, developed primarily for recreational use. Here by combining such a low-cost EEG system with other off-the-shelve hardware and tailor-made software, we develop in the lab and test in a cinema such a scalable EEG hyper-scanning system. The system has a robust and stable performance and achieves accurate unambiguous alignment of the recorded data of the different EEG headsets. These characteristics combined with small preparation time and low-cost make it an ideal candidate for recording large portions of audiences.
当人类形成一个由总体背景定义的大群体时，例如剧院或体育赛事中的观众，其背后展开的神经机制在很大程度上是未知且未被探索的。这主要是由于缺乏一种可扩展的系统，该系统能够同时记录如此大量观众中相当大一部分人的大脑活动。尽管这种系统的技术已经存在很长时间了，但高昂的成本以及人力资源和后勤规划方面的巨大开销阻碍了这样一个系统的开发。然而，近年来技术成本和尺寸的降低导致了低成本、面向消费者的脑电图（EEG）系统的出现，这些系统主要是为娱乐用途而开发的。在这里，通过将这种低成本的EEG系统与其他现成的硬件和定制软件相结合，我们在实验室中开发并在电影院中测试了这样一种可扩展的EEG超扫描系统。该系统具有强大而稳定的性能，并能实现不同EEG耳机记录数据的准确无误对齐。这些特性加上准备时间短和成本低，使其成为记录大量观众的理想选择。
