EEG Blink Artifacts Can Identify Read Music in Listening and Imagery

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that eye blink patterns recorded via EEG can be used to identify the specific music a person is reading or imagining, revealing a novel link between eye movements and cognitive music processing.

Contribution

It introduces a method to decode music reading and imagery from blink timing in EEG data, highlighting the informational value of eye artifacts in cognitive studies.

Findings

Blink patterns can identify music reading with above chance accuracy.

Accuracy varies with subject, condition, and timing parameters.

Eye blinks may be useful in wearable brain decoding devices.

Abstract

Eye-movement related artifacts including blinks and saccades are significantly larger in amplitude than cortical activity as recorded by scalp electroencephalography (EEG), but are typically discarded in EEG studies focusing on cognitive mechanisms as explained by cortical source activity. Accumulating evidence however indicates that spontaneous eye blinks are not necessarily random, and can be modulated by attention and cognition beyond just physiological necessities. In this exploratory analysis we reanalyze a public EEG dataset of musicians listening to or imagining music (Bach chorales) while simultaneously reading from a sheet of music. We ask whether blink timing in reading music, accompanied by listening or imagery, is sufficient to uniquely identify the music being read from a given score. Intra-subject blink counts and timing are compared across trials using a spike train distance metric (Victor and Purpura, 1997). One-trial-left-out cross-validation is used to identify the music being read with above chance level accuracy (best subject: 56\%, chance: 25\%), where accuracy is seen to vary with subject, condition, and a tunable cost factor for time shifts. Future studies may consider incorporating eye blink contributions to brain decoding, especially in wearables where eye blinks could be easier to record than EEG given their higher amplitudes.