Sustained attention is a cognitive ability to maintain task focus over extended periods of time (Mackworth, 1948; Chun, Golomb, & Turk-Browne, 2011). In this study, scalp electroencephalography (EEG) signals were processed in real time using a 32 dry-electrode system during a sustained visual attention task. An attention training paradigm was implemented, as designed in DeBettencourt, Cohen, Lee, Norman, and Turk-Browne (2015) in which the composition of a sequence of blended images is updated based on the participant's decoded attentional level to a primed image category. It was hypothesized that a single neurofeedback training session would improve sustained attention abilities. Twenty-two participants were trained on a single neurofeedback session with behavioral pretraining and posttraining sessions within three consecutive days. Half of the participants functioned as controls in a double-blinded design and received sham neurofeedback. During the neurofeedback session, attentional states to primed categories were decoded in real time and used to provide a continuous feedback signal customized to each participant in a closed-loop approach. We report a mean classifier decoding error rate of 34.3% (chance = 50%). Within the neurofeedback group, there was a greater level of task-relevant attentional information decoded in the participant's brain before making a correct behavioral response than before an incorrect response. This effect was not visible in the control group (interaction p=7.23e-4), which strongly indicates that we were able to achieve a meaningful measure of subjective attentional state in real time and control participants' behavior during the neurofeedback session. We do not provide conclusive evidence whether the single neurofeedback session per se provided lasting effects in sustained attention abilities. We developed a portable EEG neurofeedback system capable of decoding attentional states and predicting behavioral choices in the attention task at hand. The neurofeedback code framework is Python based and open source, and it allows users to actively engage in the development of neurofeedback tools for scientific and translational use.

Epilepsy is the most diffuse brain disorder that can affect people's lives even on its early stage. In this paper, we used for the first time the spiking neural networks (SNN) framework called NeuCube for the analysis of electroencephalography (EEG) data recorded from a person affected by Absence Epileptic (AE), using permutation entropy (PE) features. Our results demonstrated that the methodology constitutes a valuable tool for the analysis and understanding of functional changes in the brain in term of its spiking activity and connectivity. Future applications of the model aim at personalised modelling of epileptic data for the analysis and the event prediction.

In this paper, we address the issue of dealing with huge amounts of data from recordings of an Electroencephalogram (EEG) in epileptic patients. In particular, the attention is focused on the development of tools to support the neurophysiologists in the time consuming and challenging task of reviewing the EEG to identify critical events that are worth of inspection for diagnostic purposes. A novel methodology is proposed for the automatic estimation of descriptors of EEG complexity and the subsequent classification of critical events. Based on the estimation of Permutation Entropy (PE) profiles from the EEG traces, the methodology relies on Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) to cluster the electrodes in a competitive way according to their PE levels and to classify the cerebral state accordingly. An absence seizure EEG of 15.5 minutes was processed and a 93.94% sensitivity together with a 100% specificity were obtained.

We show how to use artificial neural networks as a quantitative tool in studying real neuronal processing in the monkey visual system. Training a network to classify neuronal signals according to the stimulus that elicited them permits us to calculate the information transmitted by these signals. We illustrate this for neurons in the primary visual cortex with measurements of the information transmitted about visual stimuli and for cells in inferior temporal cortex with measurements of information about behavioral context. For the latter neurons we also illustrate how artificial neural networks can be used to model the computation they do.