Yasuhara Masaki, Nambu Isao
Graduate School of Engineering, Nagaoka University of Technology, Nagaoka, Japan.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2025 Jan 28;19:1516721. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2025.1516721. eCollection 2025.
Humans achieve efficient behaviors by perceiving and responding to errors. Error-related potentials (ErrPs) are electrophysiological responses that occur upon perceiving errors. Leveraging ErrPs to improve the accuracy of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), utilizing the brain's natural error-detection processes to enhance system performance, has been proposed. However, the influence of external and contextual factors on the detectability of ErrPs remains poorly understood, especially in multitasking scenarios involving both BCI operations and sensorimotor control. Herein, we hypothesized that the difficulty in sensorimotor control would lead to the dispersion of neural resources in multitasking, resulting in a reduction in ErrP features. To examine this, we conducted an experiment in which participants were instructed to keep a ball within a designated area on a board, while simultaneously attempting to control a cursor on a display through motor imagery. The BCI provided error feedback with a random probability of 30%. Three scenarios-without a ball (single-task), lightweight ball (easy-task), and heavyweight ball (hard-task)-were used for the characterization of ErrPs based on the difficulty of sensorimotor control. In addition, to examine the impact of multitasking on ErrP-BCI performance, we analyzed single-trial classification accuracy offline. Contrary to our hypothesis, varying the difficulty of sensorimotor control did not result in significant changes in ErrP features. However, multitasking significantly affected ErrP classification accuracy. analyses revealed that the classifier trained on single-task ErrPs exhibited reduced accuracy under hard-task scenarios. To our knowledge, this study is the first to investigate how ErrPs are modulated in a multitasking environment involving both sensorimotor control and BCI operation in an offline framework. Although the ErrP features remained unchanged, the observed variation in accuracy suggests the need to design classifiers that account for task load even before implementing a real-time ErrP-based BCI.
人类通过感知错误并做出反应来实现高效行为。错误相关电位(ErrPs)是在感知错误时出现的电生理反应。有人提出利用ErrPs来提高脑机接口(BCI)的准确性,即利用大脑的自然错误检测过程来提升系统性能。然而,外部和情境因素对ErrPs可检测性的影响仍知之甚少,尤其是在涉及BCI操作和感觉运动控制的多任务场景中。在此,我们假设感觉运动控制的难度会导致多任务中神经资源的分散,从而导致ErrP特征减少。为了验证这一点,我们进行了一项实验,要求参与者将一个球保持在板上的指定区域内,同时试图通过运动想象来控制显示屏上的光标。BCI以30%的随机概率提供错误反馈。根据感觉运动控制的难度,使用三种场景——无球(单任务)、轻球(易任务)和重球(难任务)——来表征ErrPs。此外,为了研究多任务对ErrP-BCI性能的影响,我们离线分析了单次试验分类准确率。与我们的假设相反,改变感觉运动控制的难度并没有导致ErrP特征的显著变化。然而,多任务显著影响了ErrP分类准确率。分析表明,在单任务ErrPs上训练的分类器在难任务场景下准确率降低。据我们所知,本研究是首次在离线框架下研究在涉及感觉运动控制和BCI操作的多任务环境中ErrPs是如何被调制的。尽管ErrP特征保持不变,但观察到的准确率变化表明,即使在实现基于ErrP的实时BCI之前,也需要设计考虑任务负载的分类器。