Tactile P300 brain-computer interface (BCI) generally has a worse accuracy and information transfer rate (ITR) than the visual-based BCI. It may be due to the fact that human beings have a relatively poor tactile perception. This study investigated the influence of visual attention on the performance of a tactile P300 BCI. We designed our paradigms based on a novel cheeks-stim paradigm which attached the stimulators on the subject’s cheeks. Two paradigms were designed as follows: a paradigm with no visual attention and another paradigm with visual attention to the target position. Eleven subjects were invited to perform the two paradigms. We also recorded and analyzed the eyeball movement data during the paradigm with visual attention to explore whether the eyeball movement would have an effect on the BCI classification. The average online accuracy was 89.09% for the paradigm with visual attention, which was significantly higher than that of the paradigm with no visual attention (70.45%). Significant difference in ITR was also found between the two paradigms (p < 0.05). The results demonstrated that visual attention was an effective method to improve the performance of tactile P300 BCI. Our findings suggested that it may be feasible to complete an efficient tactile BCI system by adding visual attention.

中文翻译：

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视觉注意力对具有 Cheeks-Stim 范式的新型触觉 P300 脑机接口性能的影响

触觉 P300 脑机接口 (BCI) 通常比基于视觉的 BCI 具有更差的准确性和信息传输率 (ITR)。这可能是由于人类的触觉感知相对较差。本研究调查了视觉注意力对触觉 P300 BCI 性能的影响。我们基于一种新颖的脸颊刺激范式设计了我们的范式，该范式将刺激器连接在受试者的脸颊上。设计了两个范式如下：一个没有视觉注意的范式和另一个对目标位置有视觉注意的范式。邀请了 11 名受试者来执行这两种范式。我们还记录和分析了视觉注意范式期间的眼球运动数据，以探索眼球运动是否会对 BCI 分类产生影响。有视觉注意的范式的平均在线准确率为 89.09%，显着高于没有视觉注意的范式（70.45%）。两种范式之间的 ITR 也存在显着差异（p < 0.05）。结果表明，视觉注意力是提高触觉 P300 BCI 性能的有效方法。我们的研究结果表明，通过增加视觉注意力来完成一个有效的触觉 BCI 系统可能是可行的。