Effects of Distracting Task with Different Mental Workload on Steady-State Visual Evoked Potential Based Brain Computer Interfaces—an Offline Study

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), independent of the brain's normal output pathways, are attracting an increasing amount of attention as devices that extract neural information. As a typical type of BCI system, the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)-based BCIs possess a high signal-to-noise ratio and information transfer rate. However, the current high speed SSVEP-BCIs were implemented with subjects concentrating on stimuli, and intentionally avoided additional tasks as distractors. This paper aimed to investigate how a distracting simultaneous task, a verbal n-back task with different mental workload, would affect the performance of SSVEP-BCI. The results from fifteen subjects revealed that the recognition accuracy of SSVEP-BCI was significantly impaired by the distracting task, especially under a high mental workload. The average classification accuracy across all subjects dropped by 8.67% at most from 1- to 4-back, and there was a significant negative correlation (maximum r = -0.48, p < 0.001) between accuracy and subjective mental workload evaluation of the distracting task. This study suggests a potential hindrance for the SSVEP-BCI daily use, and then improvements should be investigated in the future studies.