Anti-Heartbeat-Evoked Potentials Performance in Event-Related Potentials-Based Mental Workload Assessment

Sangin Park; Jihyeon Ha; Laehyun Kim

doi:10.3389/fphys.2021.744071

Anti-Heartbeat-Evoked Potentials Performance in Event-Related Potentials-Based Mental Workload Assessment

Front Physiol. 2021 Oct 18:12:744071. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2021.744071. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Sangin Park¹, Jihyeon Ha^{1

2}, Laehyun Kim^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Bionics, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Seoul, South Korea.
² Department of Biomedical Engineering, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea.
³ Department of HY-KIST Bio-Convergence, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea.

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs) on the performance of an event-related potential (ERP)-based classification of mental workload (MWL). We produced low- and high-MWLs using a mental arithmetic task and measured the ERP response of 14 participants. ERP trials were divided into three conditions based on the effect of HEPs on ERPs: ERP_HEP, containing the heartbeat in a period of 280-700ms in ERP epochs after the target; ERP_A-HEP, not including the heartbeat within the same period; and ERP_T, all trials including ERP_A-HEP and ERP_HEP. We then compared MWL classification performance using the amplitude and latency of the P600 ERP among the three conditions. The ERP_A-HEP condition achieved an accuracy of 100% using a radial basis function-support vector machine (with 10-fold cross-validation), showing an increase of 14.3 and 28.6% in accuracy compared to ERP_T (85.7%) and ERP_HEP (71.4%), respectively. The results suggest that evoked potentials caused by heartbeat overlapped or interfered with the ERPs and weakened the ERP response to stimuli. This study reveals the effect of the evoked potentials induced by heartbeats on the performance of the MWL classification based on ERPs.

Keywords: electroencephalography; event-related potentials; heartbeat-evoked potentials; mental workload; subjective mental effort questionnaire.