Preliminary results using a P300 brain-computer interface speller: a possible interaction effect between presentation paradigm and set of stimuli

Abstract

Several proposals to improve the performance controlling a P300-based BCI speller have been studied using the standard row-column presentation (RCP) par-adigm. However, this paradigm could not be suitable for those patients with lack of gaze control. To solve that, the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) para-digm, which presents the stimuli located in the same position, has been proposed in previous studies. Thus, the aim of the present work is to assess if a stimuli set of pictures that improves the performance in RCP, could also improve the per-formance in a RSVP paradigm. Six participants have controlled four conditions in a calibration task: letters in RCP, pictures in RCP, letters in RSVP and pictures in RSVP. The results showed that pictures in RCP obtained the best accuracy and information transfer rate. The improvement effect given by pictures was greater in the RCP paradigm than in RSVP. Therefore, the improvements reached under RCP may not be directly transferred to the RSVP.