Comment on "On the Extraction of Purely Motor EEG Neural Correlates during an Upper Limb Visuomotor Task"

TL;DR

This paper discusses the impact of eye and head movement artifacts on EEG-based motor decoding studies, clarifying the specific context and implications for previous research.

Contribution

It offers a nuanced perspective on EEG artifact influence, distinguishing between different types of artifacts and their relevance to prior motor decoding studies.

Findings

Eye and head movements can introduce artifacts affecting EEG classification.

Not all artifacts equally impact the interpretation of motor decoding results.

Clarifies the context of previous EEG studies in light of artifact concerns.

Abstract

Bibian et al. show in their recent paper (Bibi\'an et al. 2021) that eye and head movements can affect the EEG-based classification in a reaching motor task. These movements can generate artefacts that can cause an overoptimistic estimation of the classification accuracy. They speculate that such artefacts jeopardise the interpretation of the results from several motor decoding studies including our study (Ofner et al. 2017). While we endorse their warning about artefacts in general, we do have doubts whether their work supports such a statement with respect to our study. We provide in this commentary a more nuanced contextualization of our work presented in Ofner et al. and the type of artefacts investigated in Bibian et al.