Single trial detection of error-related potentials in brain–machine interfaces: a survey and comparison of methods

Abstract

Abstract Objective. Error-related potential (ErrP) is a potential elicited in the brain when humans perceive an error. ErrPs have been researched in a variety of contexts, such as to increase the reliability of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), increase the naturalness of human–machine interaction systems, teach systems, as well as study clinical conditions. Still, there is a significant challenge in detecting ErrP from a single trial, which may hamper its effective use. The literature presents ErrP detection accuracies quite variable across studies, which raises the question of whether this variability depends more on classification pipelines or on the quality of elicited ErrPs (mostly directly related to the underlying paradigms). Approach. With this purpose, 11 datasets have been used to compare several classification pipelines which were selected according to the studies that reported online performance above 75%. We also analyze the effects of different steps of the pipelines, such as resampling, window selection, augmentation, feature extraction, and classification. Main results. From our analysis, we have found that shrinkage-regularized linear discriminant analysis is the most robust method for classification, and for feature extraction, using Fisher criterion beamformer spatial features and overlapped window averages result in better classification performance. The overall experimental results suggest that classification accuracy is highly dependent on user tasks in BCI experiments and on signal quality (in terms of ErrP morphology, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and discrimination). Significance. This study contributes to the BCI research field by responding to the need for a guideline that can direct researchers in designing ErrP-based BCI tasks by accelerating the design steps.