Improved targeting through collaborative decision-making and brain computer interfaces

This paper reports a first step toward a brain-computer interface (BCI) for collaborative targeting. Specifically, we explore, from a broad perspective, how the collaboration of a group of people can increase the performance on a simple target identification task. To this end, we requested a group of people to identify the location and color of a sequence of targets appearing on the screen, and measured the time and the accuracy of the response. The individual results are compared to a collective identification result determined by simple majority voting, with random choice in case of drawn. The results are promising, as the identification becomes significantly more reliable even with this simple voting, and with a small number of people (either odd or even) involved in the decision. In addition, the paper briefly analyzes the role of brain-computer interfaces in collaborative targeting, extending the targeting task by using a BCI instead of a mechanical response.