Spatial auditory BCI with ERP responses to front-back to the head stimuli distinction support

This paper presents recent results obtained with a new auditory spatial localization based BCI paradigm in which ERP shape differences at early latencies are employed to enhance classification accuracy in an oddball experimental setting. The concept relies on recent results in auditory neuroscience showing the possibility to differentiate early anterior contralateral responses to the spatial sources attended to. We also find that early brain responses indicate which direction, front or rear loudspeaker source, the subject attended to. Contemporary stimuli-driven BCI paradigms benefit most from the P300 ERP latencies in a so-called “aha-response” setting. We show the further enhancement of the classification results in a spatial auditory paradigm, in which we incorporate N200 latencies. The results reveal that these early spatial auditory ERPs boost offline classification results of the BCI application. The offline BCI experiments with the multi-command BCI prototype support our research hypothesis with higher classification results and improved information transfer rates.