Abstract
In this paper, a comparison of two existing P300 spellers is conducted. In the first speller, the visual stimuli of characters are presented in a single character (SC) paradigm and each button corresponding to a character flashes individually in a random order. The second speller is based on a region-based (RB) paradigm. In the first level, all characters are grouped and each button corresponding to a group flashes individually in a random order. Once a group is selected, the characters in it will appear on the flashing buttons of the second level for the selection of desired character. In a spelling experiment involving 12 subjects, higher online accuracy was obtained on the RB paradigm-based P300 speller than the SC paradigm-based P300 speller. Furthermore, we analyzed P300 detection performance, the P300 waveforms and Fisher ratios using the data collected by the two spellers. It was found that the stimuli display paradigm of the RB speller enhances P300 potential and is more suitable for P300 detection.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allison BZ, Pineda JA (2003) Erps evoked by different matrix sizes: implications for a brain computer interface (bci) system. IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 11(2):110–113
Allison BZ, Pineda JA (2006) Effects of soa and flash pattern manipulations on erps, performance, and preference: implications for a bci system. Int J Psychophysiol 59(2):127–140
Bernat E, Shevrin H, Snodgrass M (2001) Subliminal visual oddball stimuli evoke a p300 component. Clin Neurophysiol 112(1):159–171
Blankertz B, Muller KR, Curio G, Vaughan TM, Schalk G, Wolpaw JR, Schlogl A, Neuper C, Pfurtscheller G, Hinterberger T, Schroder M, Birbaumer N (2004) The bci competition 2003: progress and perspectives in detection and discrimination of eeg single trials. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng 51(6):1044–1051
Chang C, Lin C (2011) Libsvm: a library for support vector machines. ACM Trans Intell Syst Technol (TIST) 2(3):27
Covington JW, Polich J (1996) P300, stimulus intensity, and modality. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol/Evoked Potentials Sect 100(6):579–584
Donchin E, Spencer KM, Wijesinghe R (2000) The mental prosthesis: assessing the speed of a p300-based brain–computer interface. IEEE Trans Rehabil Eng 8(2):174–179
Duda RO, Hart PE (1973) Pattern classification and scene analysis, vol 1. Wiley, New York
Fabiani M, Gratton G, Karis D, Donchin E (1987) Definition, identification, and reliability of measurement of the p300 component of the event-related brain potential. Adv Psychophysiol 2(S1):78
Farwell LA (2012) Brain fingerprinting: a comprehensive tutorial review of detection of concealed information with event-related brain potentials. Cogn Neurodyn 6(2):115–154
Farwell LA, Donchin E (1988) Talking off the top of your head: toward a mental prosthesis utilizing event-related brain potentials. Electroencephalogr Clin Neurophysiol 70(6):510–523
Fazel Rezai R, Abhari K (2008) A comparison between a matrix-based and a region-based p300 speller paradigms for brain–computer interface. Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc 2008:1147–1150
Fazel-Rezai R (2007) Human error in p300 speller paradigm for brain–computer interface. In: Proceedings of the 29th annual international conference on IEEE EMBS, pp 2516–2519
Fazel-Rezai R, Abhari K (2009) A region-based p300 speller for brain–computer interface. Can J Electr Comput Eng 34(3):81–85
Fazel-Rezai R, Ahmad W (2011) P300-based brain–computer interface paradigm design. In: Reza Fazel (ed) Recent Advances in Brain-Computer Interface Systems. InTech, pp 83–98
Gonsalvez CJ, Polich J (2002) P300 amplitude is determined by target-to-target interval. Psychophysiology 39(3):388–396
Guan C, Thulasidas M, Wu J (2004) High performance p300 speller for brain–computer interface. IEEE international workshop on biomedical circuits, pp 13–16
Guger C, Daban S, Sellers E, Holzner C, Krausz G, Carabalona R, Gramatica F, Edlinger G (2009) How many people are able to control a p300-based brain–computer interface (bci)? Neurosci Lett 462(1):94–98
Güntekin B, Başar E (2010) A new interpretation of p300 responses upon analysis of coherences. Cogn Neurodyn 4(2):107–118
Long J, Gu Z, Li Y, Yu T, Li F, Fu M (2011) Semi-supervised joint spatio-temporal feature selection for p300-based bci speller. Cogn Neurodyn 5(4):387–398
McFarland D, Sarnacki W, Townsend G, Vaughan T, Wolpaw J (2011) The p300-based brain–computer interface (bci): effects of stimulus rate. Clin Neurophysiol 122(4):731–737
Qin Y, Xu P, Yao D (2010) A comparative study of different references for eeg default mode network: the use of the infinity reference. Clin Neurophysiol 121(12):1981–1991
Salvaris M, Sepulveda F (2009) Visual modificatios on the p300 speller bci paradim. J Neural Eng 6:046011
Sellers EW, Krusienski DJ, McFarland DJ, Vaughan TM, Wolpaw JR (2006) A p300 event-related potential brain–computer interface (bci): the effects of matrix size and inter stimulus interval on performance. Biol Psychol 73(3):242–252
Strasburger H (2005) Unfocussed spatial attention underlies the crowding effect in indirect form vision. J Vis 5(11):1024–1037
Takano K, Komatsu T, Hata N, Nakajima Y, Kansaku K (2009) Visual stimuli for the p300 brain–computer interface: a comparison of white/gray and green/blue flicker matrices. Clin Neurophysiol 120(8):1562–1566
Talebi N, Nasrabadi AM, Curran T (2012) Investigation of changes in EEG complexity during memory retrieval: the effect of midazolam. Cogn Neurodyn 6(6): 537–546
Townsend G, LaPallo BK, Boulay CB, Krusienski DJ, Frye GE, Hauser CK, Schwartz NE, Vaughan TM, Wolpaw JR, Sellers EW (2010) A novel p300-based brain–computer interface stimulus presentation paradigm: moving beyond rows and columns. Clin Neurophysiol 121(7):1109–1120
Vaughan TM, McFarland DJ, Schalk G, Sarnacki WA., Krusienski DJ, Sellers EW, Wolpaw JR (2006) The wadsworth bci research and development program: at home with bci. IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng 14(2):229–233
Wolpaw JR, Birbaumer N, McFarland DJ, Pfurtscheller G, Vaughan TM (2002) Brain–computer interfaces for communication and control. Clin Neurophysiol 113(6):767–791
Yao D (2001) A method to standardize a reference of scalp eeg recordings to a point at infinity. Physiol Meas 22:693–710
Yao D (2002) The theoretical relation of scalp laplacian and scalp current density of a spherical shell head model. Phys Med Biol 47:2179
Acknowledgments
Many thanks go to all the subjects who volunteered to participate in the experiments described in this paper. This work was supported by National High-Tech R & D Program of China (863 Program) under Grant 2012AA011601, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 91120305, 61175114 and 61105121, and High Level Talent Project of Guangdong Province, Peoples Republic of China.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pan, J., Li, Y., Gu, Z. et al. A comparison study of two P300 speller paradigms for brain–computer interface. Cogn Neurodyn 7, 523–529 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-013-9253-1
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-013-9253-1