Post-saccadic event related potential toward a new technique for information retrieval

In this paper, toward a brain-computer interface for information retrieval, we performed preliminary experiments on post-saccadic event related potential (ERP) during web browsing. Two channel electroencephalogram was analyzed with five subjects during simple string retrieval tasks using web browser with active eye movements, i.e., saccadic eye movements. After the saccadic eye movements the ERP signals were observed in target string retrievals, whereas not observed in standard string retrievals. The classification algorithm was applied and the average decoding performance of single-shot post-saccadic ERP could be 78.2% and 77.6% in recall and precision, respectively. The eye-tracking was also studied and the eye gaze points were confirmed to be on and around target strings when the ERP was elicited. This result suggests that the post-saccadic ERP with eye-tracking leads to a possibility of the use in the brain-computer interface for information retrieval.