Background: A great part of brain-computer interfaces (BCI’s) research has so far, been focusing on interactions using exogenous responses under selective attention with synchronous and reactive methods for clear relation with controlled stimuli and the widespread applicability of the methods. Over the two past decades, event-related potentials (ERP’s) have become more and more investigated for a broader community of researchers due to the relatively little amount of training necessary for a system to perform and their detection across diverse modalities of acquisition to correlate with the sensory discrimination of dedicated stimuli. The proposed study aims to observe the detection of ERP’s components and correlated neural
phenomena under the visual presentation of complex stimuli and devise processing methods that would generalize their classification for applications in computer-aided architectural design (CAAD), where visual complexity becomes an intrinsic feature of the tasks.
Methods: Its objective is exploratory and twofold: evaluating data processing and stimulus presentation methods, as well as the evolution of similar responses in repeated measures intra- and inter-subjects in non-clinical states. The study is divided into 4 phases of offline-online experiments across its timeline. Offline experiments are used to study and validate base methods, and online experiments are used to validate their modifications for application usage. Each of these experiments are framed by cross-sectional and longitudinal sub-studies. The chosen neural phenomena and study, as well as the presentation paradigm, precondition the trial design with repeated measures for averaging temporal waveforms within an exploratory framework. An expected total of at least 200 participants will be recruited over the course of the study. The aim is to recruit for a distribution of age, gender and participants that are involved in studies or practices of architecture, visual arts or related to maximize statistical significance regarding the targeted population segment.
Discussion: This study aims to investigate the cardinality of discriminative neural patterns correlated with the presentation of complex visual stimuli by detecting subcomponents of these neural phenomena using the designed system on short and prolonged periods of time and involving participants from architecture, visual arts or related fields. Subsequent results will bring to further discussion the role of visual experience in such system and the range it might address in the population segment.
Trial Status: The first phase of the study has been submitted for non-clinical trials and approved by ETH Z¨urich Ethics Commission on the 02nd July 2021 and given the registration ID: EK 2021-N-106. The first trial has been approved on August 1st 2021