Comparison of steady-state visual and somatosensory evoked potentials for brain-computer interface control.

Many proposed EEG-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) make use of visual stimuli to elicit steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP), the frequency of which can be mapped to a computer input. However, such a control scheme can be ineffective if a user has no motor control over their eyes and cannot direct their gaze towards a flashing stimulus to generate such a signal. Tactile-based methods, such as somatosensory steady-state evoked potentials (SSSEP), are a potentially attractive alternative in these scenarios.

Effects of spectral content on Horii Oral-Nasal Coupling scores in children.

A miniature accelerometer and microphone can be used to obtain Horii Oral-Nasal Coupling (HONC) scores to objectively measure nasalization of speech. While this instrumentation compares favorably in terms of size and cost relative to other objective measures of nasality, the metric has not been well characterized in children. Furthermore, the measure is known to be affected by vowel loading, as speech loaded with "high" vowels is consistently scored as more nasal than speech loaded with "low" vowels.

Quantifying attentional modulation of auditory-evoked cortical responses from single-trial electroencephalography.

Selective auditory attention is essential for human listeners to be able to communicate in multi-source environments. Selective attention is known to modulate the neural representation of the auditory scene, boosting the representation of a target sound relative to the background, but the strength of this modulation, and the mechanisms contributing to it, are not well understood. Here, listeners performed a behavioral experiment demanding sustained, focused spatial auditory attention while we measured cortical responses using electroencephalography (EEG).

How visual cues for when to listen aid selective auditory attention.

Visual cues are known to aid auditory processing when they provide direct information about signal content, as in lip reading. However, some studies hint that visual cues also aid auditory perception by guiding attention to the target in a mixture of similar sounds. The current study directly tests this idea for complex, nonspeech auditory signals, using a visual cue providing only timing information about the target.