EEG Spectral Conditioning for Cognitive-state Classification in Interactive Virtual Reality

The integration of electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors into virtual reality (VR) headsets can provide the capability of tracking the user's cognitive state and eventually be used to increase the sense of immersion. Interactive VR applications that combine cognitive tasks and physical movements primarily introduce two types of contamination to the EEG signal: (1) those that result from the physical motion and (2) those that result from more subtle head and neck muscle tension. Each of these types of contamination can have distinct spatial and spectral characteristics, and thus should be processed differently. This study examines the suppression of both types of contamination in the EEG, and the respective impacts on cognitive workload classification.