You Are Wrong! - Automatic Detection of Interaction Errors from Brain Waves

Abstract

Brain-computer interfaces, as any other interaction modality based on physiological signals and body channels (e.g., muscular activity, speech and gestures), are prone to errors in the recognition of subject’s intent. In this paper we exploit a unique feature of the “brain channel”, namely that it carries information about cognitive states that are crucial for a purposeful interaction. One of these states is the awareness of erroneous responses. Different physiological studies have shown the presence of error-related potentials (ErrP) in the EEG recorded right after people get aware they have made an error. However, for human-computer interaction, the central question is whether ErrP are also elicited when the error is made by the interface during the recognition of the subject’s intent and no longer by errors of the subject himself. In this paper we report experimental results with three volunteer subjects during a simple human-robot interaction (i.e., bringing the robot to either the left or right side of a room) that seem to reveal a new kind of ErrP, which is satisfactorily recognized in single trials. These recognition rates significantly improve the performance of the brain interface.