Detection of movement related cortical potential: Effects of causal vs. non-causal processing

Movement Related Cortical Potentials (MRCP) have been the subject of numerous studies. They accompany many self-initiated movements and this makes them a good candidate for incorporation in BCI paradigms. In this work we propose a novel experimental protocol involving natural controlling of a computer mouse and based on EEG recordings from 5 subjects, show that it elicits MRCP. We also show the feasibility of online detection of MRCP by implementing a classification based detection framework. Additionally, we discuss the adverse effects of causality restriction on detection performance by implementing an additional offline approach relaxing those restrictions and comparing the results. The best MRCP detection performance achieved on the recorded data with the offline approach has an average maximum accuracy of 0.76 and with the online approach an average AUC of 0.953.