TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kleih, Sonja C.
A1  - Kübler, Andrea
T1  - Empathy, motivation, and P300-BCI performance
JF  - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
N2  - Motivation moderately influences brain–computer interface (BCI) performance in healthy subjects when monetary reward is used to manipulate extrinsic motivation. However, the motivation of severely paralyzed patients, who are potentially in need for BCI, could mainly be internal and thus, an intrinsic motivator may be more powerful. Also healthy subjects who participate in BCI studies could be internally motivated as they may wish to contribute to research and thus extrinsic motivation by monetary reward would be less important than the content of the study. In this respect, motivation could be defined as “motivation-to-help.” The aim of this study was to investigate, whether subjects with high motivation for helping and who are highly empathic would perform better with a BCI controlled by event-related potentials (P300-BCI). We included N = 20 healthy young participants naïve to BCI and grouped them according to their motivation for participating in a BCI study in a low and highly motivated group. Motivation was further manipulated with interesting or boring presentations about BCI and the possibility to help patients. Motivation for helping did neither influence BCI performance nor the P300 amplitude. Post hoc, subjects were re-grouped according to their ability for perspective taking. We found significantly higher P300 amplitudes on parietal electrodes in participants with a low ability for perspective taking and therefore, lower empathy, as compared to participants with higher empathy. The lack of an effect of motivation on BCI performance contradicts previous findings and thus, requires further investigation. We speculate that subjects with higher empathy who are good perspective takers with regards to patients in potential need of BCI, may be more emotionally involved and therefore, less able to allocate attention on the BCI task at hand.
KW  - psychological variables
KW  - empathy
KW  - motivation
KW  - brain–computer interface
KW  - ERP
KW  - P300
Y1  - 2013
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-130559
VL  - 7
IS  - 642
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kleih-Dahms, Sonja Christina
A1  - Botrel, Loic
A1  - Kübler, Andrea
T1  - The influence of motivation and emotion on sensorimotor rhythm-based brain-computer interface performance
JF  - Psychophysiology
N2  - While decades of research have investigated and technically improved brain–computer interface (BCI)-controlled applications, relatively little is known about the psychological aspects of brain–computer interfacing. In 35 healthy students, we investigated whether extrinsic motivation manipulated via monetary reward and emotional state manipulated via video and music would influence behavioral and psychophysiological measures of performance with a sensorimotor rhythm (SMR)-based BCI. We found increased task-related brain activity in extrinsically motivated (rewarded) as compared with nonmotivated participants but no clear effect of emotional state manipulation. Our experiment investigated the short-term effect of motivation and emotion manipulation in a group of young healthy subjects, and thus, the significance for patients in the locked-in state, who may be in need of a BCI, remains to be investigated.
KW  - brain-computer interface
KW  - sensorimotor rhythm
KW  - psychological variables
KW  - motivation
KW  - emotional state
KW  - electroencephalogram
Y1  - 2021
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-259664
VL  - 58
IS  - 8
ER  -