Using the Cocktail Party Effect to Add the Coding Dimension of Auditory Event Related Potential Brain-Computer Interface

Objective: The auditory event-related potential based brain–computer interface (aERP-BCI) is a classical paradigm of brain–computer communication. To improve the coding efficiency of aERP-BCI, this study proposes a method using two parallel voice channels to add the coding dimension based on the cocktail party effect. Methods: The novel paradigm used male and female voices to establish two parallel oddball sound stimulus sequences. In comparison, the baseline paradigm only presented male or female stimulus sequences. Both the double voice condition (DVC) and the single voice condition (SVC) paradigms carried out offline experiments and the DVC also carried out online experiment. Subsequently, the EEG signal and BCI operation results were compared and analyzed. Conclusion: The cocktail party effect caused a significant difference in the EEG responses of non-target stimulus between the focused vocal channel and the ignored vocal channel under the DVC paradigm, and the focused and ignored channels achieved a recognition accuracy of 97.2%. The target recognition rate of DVC was 82.3%, with no significant difference compared with 85% of SVC while the information transfer rate (ITR) of DVC reaching 15.3 bits/min was significantly higher than that of SVC. Significance: The cocktail party effect improves the coding efficiency by adding parallel channels without reducing the target/non-target stimulus recognition in the focused vocal channel. This provides a novel direction for the performance improvement of aERP-BCI.