Selective attention promotes the perception of brain to outside world and coordinates the allocation of limited brain resources. It is a cognitive process which relies on the neural activities of attention-related brain network. As one of the important forms of brain activities, neural oscillations are closely related to selective attention. In recent years, the relationship between selective attention and neural oscillations has become a hot issue. The new method that using external rhythmic stimuli to influence neural oscillations, i.e., neural entrainment, provides a promising approach to investigate the relationship between selective attention and neural oscillations. Moreover, it provides a new method to diagnose and even to treat the attention dysfunction. This paper reviewed the research status on the relationship between selective attention and neural oscillations, and focused on the application prospects of neural entrainment in revealing this relationship and diagnosing, even treating the attention dysfunction.
Attention can concentrate our mental resources on processing certain interesting objects, which is an important mental behavior and cognitive process. Recognizing attentional states have great significance in improving human’s performance and reducing errors. However, it still lacks a direct and standardized way to monitor a person’s attentional states. Based on the fact that visual attention can modulate the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP), we designed a go/no-go experimental paradigm with 10 Hz steady state visual stimulation in background to investigate the separability of SSVEP features modulated by different visual attentional states. The experiment recorded the EEG signals of 15 postgraduate volunteers under high and low visual attentional states. High and low visual attentional states are determined by behavioral responses. We analyzed the differences of SSVEP signals between the high and low attentional levels, and applied classification algorithms to recognize such differences. Results showed that the discriminant canonical pattern matching (DCPM) algorithm performed better compared with the linear discrimination analysis (LDA) algorithm and the canonical correlation analysis (CCA) algorithm, which achieved up to 76% in accuracy. Our results show that the SSVEP features modulated by different visual attentional states are separable, which provides a new way to monitor visual attentional states.
Neurological damage caused by stroke is one of the main causes of motor dysfunction in patients, which brings great spiritual and economic burdens for society and families. Motor imagery is an important assisting method for the rehabilitation of patients after stroke, which is easy to learn with low cost and has great significance in improving the motor function and the quality of patient's life. This paper mainly summarizes the positive effects of motor imagery on post-stroke rehabilitation, outlines the physiological performance and theoretical model of motor imagery, the influencing factors of motor imagery, the scoring criteria of motor imagery and analyzes the shortcomings such as the few kinds of experimental subject, the subjective evaluation method and the low resolution of the experimental equipment in the process of rehabilitation of motor function in post-stroke patients. It is hopeful that patients with stroke will be more scientifically and effectively using motor imagery therapy.
There are few researches on the modulation effect of transcranial direct current stimulation(tDCS) on complex spatial cognition. Especially, the influence of tDCS on the neural electrophysiological response in spatial cognition is not yet clear. This study selected the classic spatial cognition task paradigm (three-dimensional mental rotation task) as the research object. By comparing the changes in behavior and event-related potentials in different modes of tDCS before, during and after the application of tDCS, this study analyzed the behavioral and neurophysiological effects of tDCS on mental rotation. The comparison between active-tDCS and sham-tDCS showed no statistically significant difference in behavior between different stimulation modes. Still, the changes in the amplitudes of P2 and P3 during the stimulation were statistically significant. Compared with sham-tDCS, the amplitudes of P2 and P3 in active-tDCS mode showed a greater decrease during the stimulation. This study clarifies the influence of tDCS on the event-related potentials of the mental rotation task. It shows that tDCS may improve the brain information processing efficiency during the mental rotation task. Also, this study provides a reference for an in-depth understanding and exploration of the modulation effect of tDCS on complex spatial cognition.
Biometrics plays an important role in information society. As a new type of biometrics, electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have special advantages in terms of versatility, durability, and safety. At present, the researches on individual identification approaches based on EEG signals draw lots of attention. Identity feature extraction is an important step to achieve good identification performance. How to combine the characteristics of EEG data to better extract the difference information in EEG signals is a research hotspots in the field of identity identification based on EEG in recent years. This article reviewed the commonly used identity feature extraction methods based on EEG signals, including single-channel features, inter-channel features, deep learning methods and spatial filter-based feature extraction methods, etc. and explained the basic principles application methods and related achievements of various feature extraction methods. Finally, we summarized the current problems and forecast the development trend.
Brain-computer interface (BCI) systems based on steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) have become one of the major paradigms in BCI research due to their high signal-to-noise ratio and short training time required by users. Fast and accurate decoding of SSVEP features is a crucial step in SSVEP-BCI research. However, the current researches lack a systematic overview of SSVEP decoding algorithms and analyses of the connections and differences between them, so it is difficult for researchers to choose the optimum algorithm under different situations. To address this problem, this paper focuses on the progress of SSVEP decoding algorithms in recent years and divides them into two categories—trained and non-trained—based on whether training data are needed. This paper also explains the fundamental theories and application scopes of decoding algorithms such as canonical correlation analysis (CCA), task-related component analysis (TRCA) and the extended algorithms, concludes the commonly used strategies for processing decoding algorithms, and discusses the challenges and opportunities in this field in the end.
Normal brain aging and a serious of neurodegenerative diseases may lead to decline in memory, attention and executive ability and poorer quality of life. The mechanism of the decline is not clear now and is still a hot issue in the fields of neuroscience and medicine. A large number of researches showed that resting state functional brain networks based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are sensitive and susceptive to the change of cognitive function. In this paper, the researches of brain functional connectivity based on resting fMRI in recent years were compared, and the results of subjects with different levels of cognitive decline including normal brain aging, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) were reviewed. And the changes of brain functional networks under three different levels of cognitive decline are introduced in this paper, which will provide the basis for the detection of normal brain aging and clinical diseases.
Alzheimer’ s disease is the most common kind of dementia without effective treatment. Via early diagnosis, early intervention after diagnosis is the most effective way to handle this disease. However, the early diagnosis method remains to be studied. Neuroimaging data can provide a convenient measurement for the brain function and structure. Brain structure network is a good reflection of the fiber structural connectivity patterns between different brain cortical regions, which is the basis of brain’s normal psychology function. In the paper, a brain structure network based on pattern recognition analysis was provided to realize an automatic diagnosis research of Alzheimer’s disease and gray matter based on structure information. With the feature selection in pattern recognition, this method can provide the abnormal regions of brain structural network. The research in this paper analyzed the patterns of abnormal structural network in Alzheimer’s disease from the aspects of connectivity and node, which was expected to provide updated information for the research about the pathological mechanism of Alzheimer’s disease.
Brain-computer interface (BCI) provides a direct communicating and controlling approach between the brain and surrounding environment, which attracts a wide range of interest in the fields of brain science and artificial intelligence. It is a core to decode the electroencephalogram (EEG) feature in the BCI system. The decoding efficiency highly depends on the feature extraction and feature classification algorithms. In this paper, we first introduce the commonly-used EEG features in the BCI system. Then we introduce the basic classical algorithms and their advanced versions used in the BCI system. Finally, we present some new BCI algorithms proposed in recent years. We hope this paper can spark fresh thinking for the research and development of high-performance BCI system.
As the most common active brain-computer interaction paradigm, motor imagery brain-computer interface (MI-BCI) suffers from the bottleneck problems of small instruction set and low accuracy, and its information transmission rate (ITR) and practical application are severely limited. In this study, we designed 6-class imagination actions, collected electroencephalogram (EEG) signals from 19 subjects, and studied the effect of collaborative brain-computer interface (cBCI) collaboration strategy on MI-BCI classification performance, the effects of changes in different group sizes and fusion strategies on group multi-classification performance are compared. The results showed that the most suitable group size was 4 people, and the best fusion strategy was decision fusion. In this condition, the classification accuracy of the group reached 77%, which was higher than that of the feature fusion strategy under the same group size (77.31% vs. 56.34%), and was significantly higher than that of the average single user (77.31% vs. 44.90%). The research in this paper proves that the cBCI collaboration strategy can effectively improve the MI-BCI classification performance, which lays the foundation for MI-cBCI research and its future application.