title: An auditory brain-computer interface using virtual sound field.
abstract: Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) exploring the auditory communication channel might be preferable for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients with poor sight or with the visual system being occupied for other uses. Spatial attention was proven to be able to modulate the event-related potentials (ERPs); yet up to now, there is no auditory BCI based on virtual sound field. In this study, auditory spatial attention was introduced by using stimuli in a virtual sound field. Subjects attended selectively to the virtual location of the target sound and discriminated its relevant properties. The concurrently recorded ERP components and the users' performance were compared with those of the paradigm where all sounds were presented in the frontal direction. The early ERP components (100-250 ms) and the simulated online accuracies indicated that spatial attention indeed added effective discriminative information for BCI classification. The proposed auditory paradigm using virtual sound field may lead to a high-performance and portable BCI system.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
authors.forename: Haiyang
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.forename: Minhui
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ouyang
authors.forename: Dan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Hong
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008328:Man-Machine Systems