Eye fixation related potentials in a target search task

Typically BCI (Brain Computer Interfaces) are found in rehabilitative or restorative applications, often allowing users a medium of communication that is otherwise unavailable through conventional means. Recently, however, there is growing interest in using BCI to assist users in searching for images. A class of neural signals often leveraged in common BCI paradigms are ERPs (Event Related Potentials), which are present in the EEG (Electroencephalograph) signals from users in response to various sensory events. One such ERP is the P300, and is typically elicited in an oddball experiment where a subject’s attention is orientated towards a deviant stimulus among a stream of presented images. It has been shown that these types of neural responses can be used to drive an image search or labeling task, where we can rank images by examining the presence of such ERP signals in response to the display of images. To date, systems like these have been demonstrated when presenting sequences of images containing targets at up to 10Hz, however, the target images in these tasks do not necessitate any kind of eye movement for their detection because the targets in the images are quite salient. In this paper we analyse the presence of discriminating signals when they are offset to the time of eye fixations in a visual search task where detection of target images does require eye fixations