Why standard brain-computer interface (BCI) training protocols should be changed: an experimental study.

OBJECTIVE While promising, electroencephaloraphy based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are barely used due to their lack of reliability: 15% to 30% of users are unable to control a BCI. Standard training protocols may be partly responsible as they do not satisfy recommendations from psychology. Our main objective was to determine in practice to what extent standard training protocols impact users' motor imagery based BCI (MI-BCI) control performance. APPROACH We performed two experiments. The first consisted in evaluating the efficiency of a standard BCI training protocol for the acquisition of non-BCI related skills in a BCI-free context, which enabled us to rule out the possible impact of BCIs on the training outcome. Thus, participants (N = 54) were asked to perform simple motor tasks. The second experiment was aimed at measuring the correlations between motor tasks and MI-BCI performance. The ten best and ten worst performers of the first study were recruited for an MI-BCI experiment during which they had to learn to perform two MI tasks. We also assessed users' spatial ability and pre-training μ rhythm amplitude, as both have been related to MI-BCI performance in the literature. MAIN RESULTS Around 17% of the participants were unable to learn to perform the motor tasks, which is close to the BCI illiteracy rate. This suggests that standard training protocols are suboptimal for skill teaching. No correlation was found between motor tasks and MI-BCI performance. However, spatial ability played an important role in MI-BCI performance. In addition, once the spatial ability covariable had been controlled for, using an ANCOVA, it appeared that participants who faced difficulty during the first experiment improved during the second while the others did not. SIGNIFICANCE These studies suggest that (1) standard MI-BCI training protocols are suboptimal for skill teaching, (2) spatial ability is confirmed as impacting on MI-BCI performance, and (3) when faced with difficult pre-training, subjects seemed to explore more strategies and therefore learn better.