Brain-Connectivity Analysis to Differentiate Phasmophobic and Non-phasmophobic: An EEG Study

Brain-connectivity refers to a pattern of functional or effective connectivity of distinct modules of human brain due to interactions between them. In this paper, the authors have attempted to conduct a brain connectivity based analysis to study the brain circuitry in subjects from their electroencephalographic (EEG) data, while they are engaged in playing a horror video game. The main motive of our work is to understand the differences in the effective connectivity among phasmophobic and non-phasmophobic subjects. In the present analysis, we propose a modified version of the causality test, named as Convergent Cross Mapping (CCM) to perform the analysis. The proposed CCM improves the performance of the standard CCM with an added feature of finding the possible direction of causation in terms of conditional entropy or maximum information transfer among the brain signal-sources. Experimental results and statistical analysis show that the proposed method shows superior efficacy in estimating the directed brain-connectivity as compared to the very well-known classical Granger Causality, classical CCM and other off-the-shelf brain-connectivity algorithms.