Directional and Causal Information Flow in EEG for Assessing Perceived Audio Quality

TL;DR

This study uses EEG and a new causal information flow measure to assess how perceived audio quality affects brain connectivity, demonstrating that CBI effectively distinguishes audio quality changes.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel causal bidirectional information (CBI) measure for analyzing EEG connectivity related to perceived audio quality, improving upon existing directed information methods.

Findings

CBI outperforms standard measures in discriminating audio quality.

Significant changes in cortical information flow correlate with perceived audio quality.

EEG connectivity patterns reflect subjective audio quality perception.

Abstract

In this paper, electroencephalography (EEG) measurements are used to infer change in cortical functional connectivity in response to change in audio stimulus. Experiments are conducted wherein the EEG activity of human subjects is recorded as they listen to audio sequences whose quality varies with time. A causal information theoretic framework is then proposed to measure the information flow between EEG sensors appropriately grouped into different regions of interest (ROI) over the cortex. A new causal bidirectional information (CBI) measure is defined as an improvement over standard directed information measures for the purposes of identifying connectivity between ROIs in a generalized cortical network setting. CBI can be intuitively interpreted as a causal bidirectional modification of directed information, and inherently calculates the divergence of the observed data from a multiple access channel with feedback. Further, we determine the analytical relationship between the different causal measures and compare how well they are able to distinguish between the perceived audio quality. The connectivity results inferred indicate a significant change in the rate of information flow between ROIs as the subjects listen to different audio qualities, with CBI being the best in discriminating between the perceived audio quality, compared to using standard directed information measures.