Abstract
Motivation moderately influences brain–computer interface (BCI) performance in healthy subjects when monetary reward is used to manipulate extrinsic motivation. However, the motivation of severely paralyzed patients, who are potentially in need for BCI, could mainly be internal and thus, an intrinsic motivator may be more powerful. Also healthy subjects who participate in BCI studies could be internally motivated as they may wish to contribute to research and thus extrinsic motivation by monetary reward would be less important than the content of the study. In this respect, motivation could be defined as “motivation-to-help.” The aim of this study was to investigate, whether subjects with high motivation for helping and who are highly empathic would perform better with a BCI controlled by event-related potentials (P300-BCI). We included N = 20 healthy young participants naïve to BCI and grouped them according to their motivation for participating in a BCI study in a low and highly motivated group. Motivation was further manipulated with interesting or boring presentations about BCI and the possibility to help patients. Motivation for helping did neither influence BCI performance nor the P300 amplitude. Post hoc, subjects were re-grouped according to their ability for perspective taking. We found significantly higher P300 amplitudes on parietal electrodes in participants with a low ability for perspective taking and therefore, lower empathy, as compared to participants with higher empathy. The lack of an effect of motivation on BCI performance contradicts previous findings and thus, requires further investigation. We speculate that subjects with higher empathy who are good perspective takers with regards to patients in potential need of BCI, may be more emotionally involved and therefore, less able to allocate attention on the BCI task at hand.
Highlights
One goal of brain–computer interface (BCI) research is to support people with severe motor impairment who need assisted communication (Kübler and Müller, 2007)
Healthy subjects who participate in BCI studies could be internally motivated as they may wish to contribute to research and extrinsic motivation by monetary reward would be less important than the content of the study
In this study we investigated the effect of motivation for helping and perspective taking on BCI performance
Summary
One goal of brain–computer interface (BCI) research is to support people with severe motor impairment who need assisted communication (Kübler and Müller, 2007). Event-related potentials (ERPs) are amongst the most efficacious input signals for BCI (Sellers et al, 2012), which are elicited after presentation of a rare stimulus (oddball) in a stream of frequent non-target stimuli (Sutton et al, 1965). In such an ERP-based BCI the user has to focus attention on the target stimulus presented either in a row or a column of a character matrix (Farwell and Donchin, 1988). Attention allocation increases the P300 amplitude which is influenced by the value of the target stimulus (Johnson, 1986)
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