Suppressing Surrounding Characters During Calibration may Improve P300-Based BCI Performance

Since the introduction of the P300 BCI speller by Farwell and Donchin1 speed and accuracy of the system has been significantly improved. Larger electrode montages and various signal processing techniques are responsible for most of the improvement in performance. The present study takes advantage of a new presentation paradigm to improve performance, the “checkerboard?(CB) paradigm2. The CB presents quasi-random groups of six items instead of using the typical row/column presentation. To determine if reducing distraction from neighbouring items could improve subsequent performance on a copy-spelling task, the CB paradigm was used and compared to a condition that suppressed (i.e., did not flash) items during the calibration phase of the experiment.