Temporal Electroencephalography Traits Dissociating Tactile Information and Cross-Modal Congruence Effects

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 24; no. 1; p. 45
• Main Authors: Ozawa, Yusuke, Yoshimura, Natsue
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 21.12.2023; MDPI
• Subjects: Brain; classification analysis; EEG; Electroencephalography; Enterprise resource planning; event-related potentials; Machine learning; Nervous system; object recognition; Sensory perception; Signal processing; somatosensory evoked potentials; Japan; object recognition; event-related potentials; EEG; classification analysis; somatosensory evoked potentials
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s24010045

To explore whether temporal electroencephalography (EEG) traits can dissociate the physical properties of touching objects and the congruence effects of cross-modal stimuli, we applied a machine learning approach to two major temporal domain EEG traits, event-related potential (ERP) and somatosensory evoked potential (SEP), for each anatomical brain region. During a task in which participants had to identify one of two material surfaces as a tactile stimulus, a photo image that matched ('congruent') or mismatched ('incongruent') the material they were touching was given as a visual stimulus. Electrical stimulation was applied to the median nerve of the right wrist to evoke SEP while the participants touched the material. The classification accuracies using ERP extracted in reference to the tactile/visual stimulus onsets were significantly higher than chance levels in several regions in both congruent and incongruent conditions, whereas SEP extracted in reference to the electrical stimulus onsets resulted in no significant classification accuracies. Further analysis based on current source signals estimated using EEG revealed brain regions showing significant accuracy across conditions, suggesting that tactile-based object recognition information is encoded in the temporal domain EEG trait and broader brain regions, including the premotor, parietal, and somatosensory areas.