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Updated: Jul 24, 2025
A Method for Tracking the Time Evolution of Steady-State Evoked Potentials
Published on: May 25, 2019
Decoding emotion from high-frequency steady state visual evoked potential (SSVEP)
1Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain Function and Disease, Center for Brain and Mental Well-being, Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.
Background:
Steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) by flickering sensory stimuli has been widely applied in the brain-machine interface (BMI). Yet, it remains largely unexplored whether affective information could be decoded from the signal of SSVEP, especially from the frequencies higher than the critical flicker frequency (an upper-frequency limit one can see the flicker).
New Method:
Participants fixated on visual stimuli presented at 60 Hz above the critical flicker frequency. The stimuli were pictures with different affective valance (positive, neutral, negative) in distinctive semantic categories (human, animal, scene). SSVEP entrainment in the brain evoked by the flickering stimuli at 60 Hz was used to decode the affective and semantic information.
Results:
During the presentation of stimuli (1 s), the affective valance could be decoded from the SSVEP signals at 60 Hz, while the semantic categories could not. In contrast, neither affective nor semantic information could be decoded from the brain signal one second before the onset of stimuli.
Comparison With Existing Method(S):
Previous studies focused mainly on EEG activity tagged at frequencies lower than the critical flickering frequency and investigated whether the affective valence of stimuli drew participants' attention. The current study was the first to use SSVEP signals from high-frequency (60 Hz) above the critical flickering frequency to decode affective information from stimuli. The high-frequency flickering was invisible and thus substantially reduced the fatigue of participants.
Conclusions:
We found that affective information could be decoded from high-frequency SSVEP and the current finding could be added to designing affective BMI in the future.
