A collaborative Brain-Computer Interface for improving group detection of visual targets in complex natural environments

Detecting a target in a complex environment can be a difficult task, both for a single individual and a group, especially if the scene is very rich of structure and there are strict time constraints. In recent research, we have demonstrated that collaborative Brain-Computer Interfaces (cBCIs) can use neural signals and response times to estimate the decision confidence of participants and use this to improve group decisions in visual-matching and visual-search tasks with artificial stimuli. This paper extends that work in two ways. Firstly, we use a much harder target detection task where observers are presented with complex natural scenes where targets are very difficult to identify. Secondly, we complement the neural and behavioural information used in our previous cBCIs with physiological features representing eye movements and eye blinks of participants in the period preceding their decisions. Results obtained with 10 participants indicate that the proposed cBCI improves decision errors by up to 3.4% (depending on group size) over group decisions made by a majority vote. Furthermore, results show that providing the system with information about eye movements and blinks further significantly improves performance over our best previously reported method.