Investigating the Efficacy of Meditation and Mental Rehearsal on EEG BCI Performance in a Pediatric Context

The present study investigated the short-term effects of mindfulness meditation on brain-computer interface (BCI) performance in a pediatric context. The vast majority of previous BCI research has focused on creating more effective machine-learning algorithms. However, further improvements in user training are sorely needed. Mindfulness meditation is a promising methodology owing to its potential to increase an individual’s mental control. Twelve able-bodied children between the ages of 10 and 18 years were recruited. An auditory-tactile P300-BCI was designed for each individual participant. Each participant completed two sessions, one with 15 minutes of meditation preceding BCI operation and the other without. BCI control entailed an auditory-tactile oddball task. An average accuracy of 80.66%+11.68% was achieved across participants without meditation, while five participants exhibited significantly improved accuracy following meditation training. Using time-frequency features and a Gaussian Naive Bayes classifier, meditative and rest states were differentiated with an accuracy of 83.94 %+13.00%.M.A.S