Effects of performing two visual tasks on single-trial detection of event-related potentials

The detection of event-related potentials (ERPs) in brain-computer interface (BCI) depends on the ability of the subject to pay attention to specific stimuli presented during the BCI task. For healthy users, a BCI shall be used as a complement to other existing devices, which involve the response to other tasks. Those tasks may impair selective attention, particularly if the stimuli have the same modality e.g. visual. It is therefore critical to analyze how single-trial detection of brain evoked response is impaired by the addition of tasks concerning the same modality. We tested 10 healthy participants using an application that has two visual target detection tasks. The first one corresponds to a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm where target detection is achieved by brain-evoked single-trial detection in the recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. The second task is the detection of a visual event on a tactical map by a behavioral response. These tasks were tested individually (single task) and in parallel (dual-task). Whereas the performance of single-trial detection was not impaired between single and dual-task conditions, the behavioral performance decreased during the dual-task condition. These results quantify the performance drop that can occur in a dual-task system using both brain-evoked responses and behavioral responses.