The effects of pink noise on the performance of steady-state motion auditory evoked potential brain–computer interface based on auditory selective attention

Steady-state motion auditory evoked potential (SSMAEP)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) simultaneously present multiple SSMAEP stimuli at different frequencies. Users selectively attend to a target stimulus while ignoring non-target stimuli, enabling the decoding of the attended stimulus through the brain's selective attention mechanism. However, in multi-source auditory environments, interference from non-target stimuli can weaken brain responses to target stimuli, thereby impairing SSMAEP-BCI performance. The phenomenon of stochastic resonance (SR) suggests that the introduction of an appropriate level of noise can facilitate signal detection in nonlinear systems. The SR mechanism may be beneficial for boosting brain responses in auditory BCIs. In this study, the effects of pink noise on brain responses elicited by SSMAEP-BCI and the performance of SSMAEP-BCI were investigated by coupling pink noise of varying intensities with SSMAEP-BCI stimuli. The results demonstrated that an optimal intensity of pink noise can significantly strengthen the brain response and reinforce the frequency domain amplitude and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of SSMAEP. Additionally, significant improvements in recognition accuracy and information transfer rate (ITR) of SSMAEP-BCI were also observed. This study provides a theoretical foundation for understanding the effects of pink noise on auditory selective attention and offers insights into the optimization of noise input in SSMAEP-BCI systems. Moreover, the role of SR in enhancing SSMAEP-BCI performance is revealed, offering both theoretical and practical significance.