Towards perception awareness: Perceptual event detection for Brain computer interfaces

Brain computer interface (BCI) technology is becoming increasingly popular in many domains such as entertainment, mental state analysis, and rehabilitation. For robust performance in these domains, detecting perceptual events would be a vital ability, enabling adaptation to and act on the basis of user´s perception of the environment. Here we present a framework to automatically mine spatiotemporal characteristics of a given perceptual event. As this “signature” is derived directly from subject´s neural behavior, it can serve as a representation of the subject´s perception of the targeted scenario, which in turn allows a BCI system to gain a new level of context awareness: perception awareness. As a proof of concept, we show the application of the proposed framework on MEG signal recordings from a face perception study, and the resulting temporal and spatial characteristics of the derived neural signature, as well as it´s compatibility with the neuroscientific literature on face perception.