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Recognition of Words from the EEG Laplacian

Recent works on the relationship between the electro-encephalogram (EEG) data and psychological stimuli show that EEG recordings can be used to recognize an auditory stimulus presented to a subject. The recognition rate is, however, strongly affected by technical and physiological artifacts. In this work, subjects were presented seven auditory simuli in the form of English words (first, second, third, left, right, yes, and no), and the time-locked electric field was recorded with a 64 channel Neuroscan EEG system. We used the surface Laplacian operator to eliminate artifacts due to sources located at regions far from the electrode. Our intent with the Laplacian was to improve the recognition rates of auditory stimuli from the electric field. To compute the Laplacian, we used a spline interpolation from spherical harmonics. The EEG Laplacian of the electric field were average over trials for the same auditory stimulus, and with those averages we constructed prototypes and test samples. In addition to the Laplacian, we applied Butterworth bandpass digital filters to the averaged prototypes and test samples, and compared the filtered test samples against the prototypes using a least squares metric in the time domain. We also analyzed the effects of the spline interpolation order and bandpass filter parameters in the recognition rates. Our results show that the use of the Laplacian improves the recognition rates and suggests a spatial isomorphism between both subjects.