Adaptive Force Control Tasks Have Far-Transfer Effect on Sustained Attention

Although attention plays an important role in perception and cognition, it is challenging to develop an effective way to train sustained attention and find biomarkers to measure attention level. The primary purpose of this investigation is to identify effective biomarkers of sustained attention and demonstrate adaptive force control tasks can improve attention skill. 128-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) data was collected from 14 participants during the haptic training: a five-consecutive-day force control task with one, two, three and four fingers. The EEG recordings were then divided into four-second epochs for analysis. We used tolerance, variance and duration of the forces of involved fingers to design a score (called 'integrated parameter') to measure the performance level of each four-second epoch. Those epochs with a high score (called 'good epochs') and a low score (called 'bad epochs') were selected for comparison. Two different brain connectivity patterns were calculated to classify the good and bad epochs. Discriminative connections were extracted and kernel support vector machine was applied to find relevant frequency bands and brain areas that can effectively separate the two types of epochs. The results showed that enhanced connection strength located at frontal and partial lobes in gamma band and reduced connection strength at frontal-parietal regions in alpha band during good epochs. Furthermore, executive control network showed significant improvement after training. It indicates that force control tasks may not only improve the behavioral performance, but also the sustained attention from different sensory channel.