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To develop a more reliable brain-computer interface (BCI) for patients in the completely locked-in state (CLIS), here we propose a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm using galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS), which can induce a strong sensation of equilibrium distortion in individuals. We hypothesized that associating two different sensations caused...
Citations
... A recent study examined semantic meaning of actions in the context of brain-computer interface by decoding "yes"/"no" answers based on EEG signals (Yoshimura et al. 2021). In this study, the authors used Pavlovian conditioning to associate different sensations (equilibrium distortion using galvanic vestibular stimulation) to "yes" and "no" answers. ...
... Localizing the neural circuits that underlie action goal representation has implications for the development of more accurate and efficient brain-machine interfaces (Ortiz-Rosario and Adeli 2013; Rezeika et al. 2018;Yoshimura et al. 2021). Moreover, shedding light on the neural architecture of action organization and identifying the processes by which internal states are constructed into actions can inspire the development of computational models for human action understanding and may provide insight with respect to pathologies such as apraxia in which action goal representation is compromised (Grafton and Hamilton 2007). ...
Voluntary actions are shaped by desired goals and internal intentions. Multiple factors, including the planning of subsequent actions and the expectation of sensory outcome, were shown to modulate kinetics and neural activity patterns associated with similar goal-directed actions. Notably, in many real-world tasks, actions can also vary across the semantic meaning they convey, although little is known about how semantic meaning modulates associated neurobehavioral measures. Here, we examined how behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging measures are modulated when subjects execute similar actions (button presses) for two different semantic meanings—to answer “yes” or “no” to a binary question. Our findings reveal that, when subjects answer using their right hand, the two semantic meanings are differentiated based on voxel patterns in the frontoparietal cortex and lateral-occipital complex bilaterally. When using their left hand, similar regions were found, albeit only with a more liberal threshold. Although subjects were faster to answer “yes” versus “no” when using their right hand, the neural differences cannot be explained by these kinetic differences. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first evidence showing that semantic meaning is embedded in the neural representation of actions, independent of alternative modulating factors such as kinetic and sensory features.
