Assessing the (Sub-)Conscious Processing of Noise based on ERPs

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the use of event-related potentials (ERPs) as a quantitative measure for quality assessment of disturbed audio signals. For this purpose, we conducted an EEG study (N = 11) using an oddball paradigm, during which subjects were presented with the phoneme /a/, superimposed with varying degrees of signal-correlated noise. Based on this data set, we address the question of to what degree the degradation of the auditory stimuli is reflected at a neural level, even if the disturbance is below the threshold of conscious perception. For stimuli that are consciously recognized as being disturbed, we suggest using the amplitude and latency of the P300 component to assess the level of disturbance. For disturbed stimuli where the noise is not consciously perceived, we show for two subjects that a classifier based on shrinkage Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) can successfully identify stimuli for which the noise was presumably processed subconsciously.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{voigtantons2010c3,
  author    = {Porbadnigk, A. K. and Antons, J.-N. and Blankertz, B. and Treder, M. S. and Schleicher, R. and Möller, S. and Curio, G.},
  title     = {Assessing the (Sub-)Conscious Processing of Noise based on ERPs},
  year      = {2010},
  booktitle = {Poster presented at the Bernstein Conference on Computational Neuroscience (BCCN 2010), Berlin, Germany},
  url       = {https://doc.ml.tu-berlin.de/bbci/publications/PorAntBlaTreSchMoeCur10.pdf},
}