BCIwiki (bciwiki.com) — Simulated blurred and monocular vision altered event-related potentials (ERPs) but did not reduce the decoding accuracy of a non-invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) driven by visual spatial attention, researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology reported in a preprint posted to bioRxiv on September 4, 2026. The study, by Reichert, Schoenfeld and Duerschmid (DOI: 10.64898/2026.09.01.748503), has not been peer reviewed.
A BCI aims to generate control signals directly from brain activity, without physical movement, including shifts of gaze. Selecting peripheral objects through attention has been used to control BCIs, but it requires enough visual acuity to recognize the target reliably. The team had healthy participants direct covert attention to peripheral visual stimuli and systematically compared ERPs and BCI performance across different stages of visual impairment, with color as the target feature.
Early attention-sensitive visual components changed in monocular compared with binocular vision, and simulated vision degradation reduced ERPs in the P300 range. Those differences did not affect the BCI's decoding accuracy.
The authors say a BCI can be reliably controlled by attending to a visual stimulus whose distinguishing features, such as color, remain recognizable despite visual impairment. They describe this as a promising approach for paralyzed people to communicate with a non-invasive, gaze-independent BCI. All participants were healthy, and the impairments were simulated.