Challenge for Affective Brain-Computer Interfaces: Non-stationary Spatio-spectral EEG Oscillations of Emotional Responses

Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based affective brain-computer interfaces (aBCIs) have been attracting ever-growing interest and research resources. Whereas most previous neuroscience studies have focused on single-day/-session recording and sensor-level analysis, less effort has been invested in assessing the fundamental nature of non-stationary EEG oscillations underlying emotional responses across days and individuals. This work thus aimed to use a data-driven blind source separation method, i.e., independent component analysis (ICA), to derive emotion-relevant spatio-spectral EEG source oscillations and assess the extent of non-stationarity. To this end, this work conducted an 8-day music-listening experiment (i.e., roughly interspaced over 2 months) and recorded whole-scalp 30-ch EEG data from 10 subjects. Given the large size of the data (i.e., from 80 sessions), results indicated that EEG non-stationarity was clearly revealed in the numbers and locations of brain sources of interest as well as their spectral modulation to the emotional responses. Less than half of subjects (two to four) showed the same relatively day-stationary (source reproducibility >6 days) spatio-spectral tendency towards one of the binary valence and arousal states. This work substantially advances the previous work by exploiting intra- and inter-individual EEG variability in an ecological multiday scenario. Such EEG non-stationarity may inevitably present a great challenge for the development of an accurate, robust, and generalized emotion-classification model.