Electroencephalography measurements during Colemak typing lessons

Citation Author(s):
David
Gutiérrez
Cinvestav Monterrey
Mauricio Adolfo
Ramírez-Moreno
Cinvestav Monterrey
Submitted by:
David Gutierrez
Last updated:
Thu, 06/25/2020 - 17:14
DOI:
10.21227/7dmt-jj36
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Abstract 

Ten volunteers were trained through a series of twelve daily lessons to type in a computer using the Colemak keyboard layout. During the fourth-, eight-, and eleventh-session, electroencephalography (EEG) measurements were acquired for the five trials each subject performed in the corresponding lesson. Electrocardiography (ECG) data at each of those trials were acquired as well. The purpose of this experiment is to aim in the development of different methods to assess the process of learning a new task. All measurements were acquired using the B-Alert X10 wireless system from Advanced Brain Monitoring. EEG sensors in that system have fixed gain, they are referenced to linked mastoids, and the sensor array distribution is based on the international 10–20 reference system. Hence, EEG sensors are positioned at F3, Fz, F4, C3, Cz, C4, P3, POz, and P4. The ECG channel measures the Lead-I. All data are acquired at a sampling frequency of 256 Hz. These datasets corresponds to the decontaminated and detrended EEG+ECG measurements. All data was acquired at the Laboratory of Biomedical Signal Processing at The Center for Research and Advanced Studies (Cinvestav), Monterrey's Unit.

Instructions: 

*Experimental setup

Ten volunteers were trained through a series of twelve daily lessons to type in a computer using the Colemak keyboard layout, which is an alternative to the QWERTY and Dvorak layouts, and it is designed for efficient and ergonomic touch typing in English. Six of our volunteers were female, four male, all of them were right-handed, and their mean age was 29.3 years old with an standard deviation of 5.7 years. The lessons used during our experiment are available on-line at colemak.com/Typing_lessons. In our case, we asked the volunteers to repeat each of them five times (with resting intervals of 2 min in between). We
chose Colemak touch typing as the ability to learn because most people are unaware of its existence, then it is a good candidate for a truly new ability to learn. The training process always took place in a sound-proof cubicle in which the volunteers were isolated from distractions. Hence, the volunteers were sitting in front of the computer and were engaged entirely in the typing lesson. All the experiments were carried at the same hour of the day, and all volunteers were asked to refrain of doing any additional training anywhere else. For more details, see [1].

*Data arrangement

A Matlab-compatible file is provided for each subject. Each .mat file contains a cell array (named Cn) of size 15x10, which corresponds to the 15 trials and 10 channels, respectively. Trials are organized as follows: rows 1-5 correspond to the measurements during the fourth Colemak lesson, rows 6-10 during the eighth, and rows 11-15 during the eleventh. Channels are organized by columns in the following order: (1) ECG, (2) F3, (3) Fz, (4) F4, (5) C3, (6) Cz, (7) C4, (8) P3, (9) POz, and (10) P4. Each of the elements of Cn correspond to a vector containing the output (time samples acquired at 256 Hz sampling frequency) of each of those channels. The lenght of each of those vectors differ between subjects, as well as for each trial depending on the time it took the corresponging subject to complete the Colemak lesson. The units of all output signals are microVolts.

*Preprocessing

All data has been preprocessed with the automatic decontamination algorithms provided by the B-Alert Live Software (BLS): raw signals are processed to eliminate known artifacts. Particularly, the following actions are taken for different type of artifacts:

• Excursions and amplifier saturation – contaminated periods are replaced with zero values, starting and ending at zero crossing before and after each event.
• Spikes caused by artifact are identified and signal value is interpolated.
• Eye Blinks (EOG) – wavelet transforms deconstruct the signal and a regression equation is used to identify the EEG regions contaminated with eye blinks. Representative EEG preceding the eye blink is inserted in the contaminated region.

Aditionally, all data were detrended using Matlab's command detrend.

*How to acknowledge

We encourage researchers to use the published dataset freely and we ask that they cite the respective data sources as well as this paper:

[1] D. Gutiérrez y M. A. Ramírez-Moreno, “Assessing a Learning Process with Functional ANOVA Estimators of EEG Power Spectral Densities,” Cognitive Neurodynamics, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 175-183, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/s11571-015-9368-7

*Credits

All data were acquired in the Laboratory of Biomedical Signal Processing, Cinvestav Monterrey, in the context of M. A. Ramírez-Moreno's MSc thesis work under the advice of D. Gutiérrez.

Dataset Files

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Documentation

AttachmentSize
File Description of main data45.52 KB
File Description of analysis38.14 KB