Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Visual Imagery for Intuitive Brain-Computer Interface

Visual imagery is an intuitive brain-computer interface paradigm, referring to the emergence of the visual scene. Despite its convenience, analysis of its intrinsic characteristics is limited. In this study, we demonstrate the effect of time interval and channel selection that affects the decoding performance of the multi-class visual imagery. We divided the epoch into time intervals of 0-1 s and 1-2 s and performed six-class classification in three different brain regions: whole brain, visual cortex, and prefrontal cortex. In the time interval, 0-1 s group showed 24.2 % of average classification accuracy, which was significantly higher than the 1-2 s group in the prefrontal cortex. In the three different regions, the classification accuracy of the prefrontal cortex showed significantly higher performance than the visual cortex in 0-1 s interval group, implying the cognitive arousal during the visual imagery. This finding would provide crucial information in improving the decoding performance.