Influence of the concrete and abstract graphs on N200 and P300 potentials

Abstract

Increasing the amplitude of event-related potential is one of the key methods to improve the accuracy of the potential-based brain-computer interface, e.g., P300-based brain-computer interface. The brain-computer interface systems often use symbols or controlled objects as vision stimuli, but what visual stimuli can induce more obvious event-related potential is still unknown. This paper designed three kinds of visual stimuli, i.e., a square, an arrow, and a robot attached with an arrow, to analyze the influence of concreteness degree of the graph on the N200 and P300 potentials, and applied a support vector machine to compare the performance of the brain-computer interface under different stimuli. The results showed that, compared with the square, the robot attached with arrow and the arrow both induced larger N200 potential ( P = 1.6 × 10 -3, P = 4.2 × 10 -2) and longer P300 potential ( P = 2.2 × 10 -3, P = 1.9 × 10 -2) in the frontal area, but the amplitude under the arrow condition is smaller than the one under the robot attached with arrow condition. The robot attached with arrow increased the N200 potential amplitude of the square and arrow from 3.12 μV and 5.19 μV to 7.21 μV ( P = 1.6 × 10 -3, P = 8.9 × 10 -2), and improved the accuracy rate from 59.95%, 61.67% to 74.45% ( P = 2.1 × 10 -2, P = 1.6 × 10 -2), and the information transfer rate from 35.00 bits/min, 35.98 bits/min to 56.71 bits/min ( P = 2.6 × 10 -2, P = 1.6 × 10 -2). This study shows that the concreteness of graphics could affect the N200 potential and the P300 potential. The abstract symbol could represent the meaning and evoke potentials, but the information contained in the concrete robot attached with an arrow is more correlated with the human experience, which is helpful to improve the amplitude. The results may provide new sight in modifying the stimulus interface of the brain-computer interface.