How Well Can We Learn With Standard BCI Training Approaches? A Pilot Study.

While being very promising, brain-computer interfaces (BCI) remain barely used outside laboratories because they are not reliable enough. It has been suggested that current training approaches may be partly responsible for the poor reliability of BCIs as they do not satisfy recommendations from psychology and are thus inadequate. To determine to which extent such BCI training approaches (i.e., feedback and training tasks) are suitable to learn a skill, we used them in another context (without a BCI) to train 20 users to perform simple motor tasks. While such approaches enabled learning for most subjects, results also showed that 15% of them were unable to learn these simple motor tasks, which is close to the BCI illiteracy rate [1]. This further suggests that current BCI training approaches may be an important factor of illiteracy, thus deserving more attention.