Toward enhanced P300 speller performance

This study examines the effects of expanding the classical P300 feature space on the classification performance of data collected from a P300 speller paradigm [Farwell LA, Donchin E. Talking off the top of your head: toward a mental prosthesis utilizing event-related brain potentials. Electroenceph Clin Neurophysiol 1988;70:510-23]. Using stepwise linear discriminant analysis (SWLDA) to construct a classifier, the effects of spatial channel selection, channel referencing, data decimation, and maximum number of model features are compared with the intent of establishing a baseline not only for the SWLDA classifier, but for related P300 speller classification methods in general. By supplementing the classical P300 recording locations with posterior locations, online classification performance of P300 speller responses can be significantly improved using SWLDA and the favorable parameters derived from the offline comparative analysis.