Effects of Stimulus Spatial Resolution on SSVEP Responses under Overt and Covert Attention.

Abstract

Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEP) Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) relies on overt spatial attention to exhibit reliable steady-state responses. There is a promising potential to employ the SSVEP paradigm in with vision research and clinical use, for instance, for visual field assessment. In this study, we investigate the SSVEP characteristics with different spatial attention, the different number of stimuli, and different viewing/visual angles. We collected data from eleven subjects in three experiment sessions, lasting about forty minutes, including the setup and calibration. Our evaluation results show similar SSVEP responses between overt and covert attention in multiple stimuli scenarios in most of the visual angles. We do not find any significant differences in SSVEP responses in visual angles between single and multi stimuli in covert attention. From this study, we found that reliable SSVEP responses can be achieved with covert spatial attention regardless of visual angles and stimulus spatial resolution.