This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal.
Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CYBERNETICS
EEG-Based Classification of Implicit Intention
During Self-Relevant Sentence Reading
Suh-Yeon Dong, Bo-Kyeong Kim, and Soo-Young Lee
Abstract—From electroencephalography (EEG) data during
self-relevant sentence reading, we were able to discriminate two
implicit intentions: 1) “agreement” and 2) “disagreement” to the
read sentence. To improve the classification accuracy, discrimi-
nant features were selected based on Fisher score among EEG
frequency bands and electrodes. Especially, the time-frequency
representation with Morlet wavelet transforms showed clear dif-
ferences in gamma, beta, and alpha band powers at frontocentral
area, and theta band power at centroparietal area. The best clas-
sification accuracy of 75.5% was obtained by a support vector
machine classifier with the gamma band features at frontocen-
tral area. This result may enable a new intelligent user-interface
which understands users’ implicit intention, i.e., unexpressed or
hidden intention.
Index Terms—Agreement/disagreement, electroencephalogra-
phy (EEG), implicit intention, self-relevance.
I. I NTRODUCTION
VER the last 25 years, electroencephalography (EEG)-
O based brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) have been devel-
oped to provide assistance to physically impaired patients [1].
Therefore, current BCI technologies had focused on rec-
ognizing and responding to users’ explicitly expressed
intentions [2]–[4]. On the other hand, we believe that intel-
ligent user interface for common people should also be able
to understand users’ unexpressed or hidden intention. We use
the term implicit intention to denote this unexpressed or hidden
intention.
However, surprisingly only a few research has been reported
to recognize human implicit intention. Even all the previous
researches on the implicit intention focused on hidden inten-
tion or lie detection, i.e., whether or not the user’s explicitly
expressed intention is the same as the actual intention [5], [6].
We focus on another type of the implicit intention, i.e., unex-
pressed intention, especially whether or not a user agrees
with the others during conversation or sentence reading.
Manuscript received July 13, 2015; accepted September 9, 2015. This work
was supported in part by the Brain Research Program through the National
Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT, and
Future Planning under Grant 2013-035100 (2013.05.01-2014.04.30), and in
part by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory through the Asian Office
of Aerospace Research and Development. This paper was recommended by
Associate Editor A. Cichocki.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Korea
Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 305-701,
Korea (e-mail: suhyeon.dong@gmail.com; kbghome@kaist.ac.kr;
sylee@kaist.ac.kr).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCYB.2015.2479240
2168-2267 c 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
1
We postulated that the implicit intentions of “agreement”
and “disagreement” elicit different brain signals, and a recent
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study showed
different activation areas for the unexpressed intentions of
agreement and disagreement [7]. In this paper, EEG signals are
used to classify the agreement-versus-disagreement implicit
intention while reading a self-relevant sentence.
EEG is a useful technique because of its noninvasive nature
and high temporal resolution. In particular, EEG oscillatory
responses are functionally related to cognitive processing [8].
Recently, changes in frequency band powers were reported
during language processing, specifically syntactic and seman-
tic processing at the sentence level. Increased power in
the theta band was observed in response to grammatical
violations [9]–[11]. Most of the increase in the theta band
power was found at the temporal areas, whereas the power
increase in the gamma band was also found at the frontal areas
in sentence processing [12], [13]. Furthermore, the alpha band
power decreased with semantic congruency [14], while the
beta band power decreased in response to semantic violations
during reading Chinese sentences [15].
The EEG-based studies were further extended with self-
relevant sentences with stronger responses. The top-down
attention to self-relevant information has been widely reported
in human perception. The most famous example of this phe-
nomenon is known as the “cocktail party effect” [16], whereby
an individual’s auditory attention can be focused on a par-
ticular stimulus (e.g., a conversation containing self-relevant
items) while filtering out other stimuli (e.g., other conversa-
tions taking place nearby). More recently, based on both EEG
and fMRI data, many researchers have suggested that self-
relevant information has preferential access to our perceptual
systems. The exposure to one’s own name evokes stronger
P300 and N250 responses than other stimuli [17]. Moreover,
it was reported that autobiographical words or phrases evoke
P300 responses [18], and that sentences written in the first per-
son elicited early components (P1, N1, and P2) [19]. Also, one
fMRI study compared brain responses between self-knowledge
and semantic knowledge [20].
However, the self-relevance may not be sufficient to excite
strong brain signals. If people do not agree with the state-
ment, the brain responses may not reflect the self-relevance.
Even in cases with strong autobiographical words or phrases
written in the first person, people may not consider them
self-relevant. Therefore, with respect to self-relevant stim-
uli, it is important to distinguish “agreed” responses from
“disagreed” responses. However, there has been no reported
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CYBERNETICS
Fig. 1. Experimental paradigm. One trial consisted of a fixation cross, main
statement (contents), a positive or negative ending phrase (sentence ending),
and a subject’s response. For each subject, 74 trials were made in sequence
separated by a fixation cross.
research to further discriminate “Yes” (or agreement) versus
“No” (or disagreement) responses on the self-relevant state-
ments. Although a recent study investigated discriminating
brain responses between “Yes/No” thinking, which actually
came from a semantic violation [21].
We had reported differences on fMRI [7], [22], [23] and
multichannel EEG signals [24], [25] between agreement and
disagreement to self-relevant statements. This paper presents
a new time-frequency EEG analysis based on Morlet wavelet
transform and discriminant electrode selection.
II. M ETHOD AND M ATERIALS
A. Subjects
Nine healthy right-handed Korean subjects (six males and
three females between 20 and 30 years old) were recruited
for this paper. All were either undergraduate or graduate stu-
dents, and participated voluntarily. None of the subjects had
a history of mental disorder, significant physical illness, head
injuries, neurological disorder, or alcohol or drug dependence.
Written informed consent was obtained from all subjects, and
this paper was approved by the institutional review board at
the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
B. Experimental Paradigm
Each subject participated an experimental session of 74 tri-
als. As shown in Fig. 1, each trial started with a fixation cross
and a beeping sound for the subject’s readiness, which was
followed by two images of a stimulating sentence to read.
Each statement consisted of a contents block and a sentence-
ending block. (The idea behind this division will be explained
in Section II-C.) The contents block was shown for 4 s and the
sentence-ending block was shown for 2 s. Immediately after-
wards, an asterisk image was presented for 2 s, and subjects
were instructed to answer whether or not they agreed with the
statement. A blank image was presented for 2 s at the end of
each trial.
During the experiment, subjects were asked to remain still
and to avoid eye blinking as much as possible, especially just
after the onset of the contents block. Before, during, and after
the experiment, the subjects were carefully monitored to make
sure of their good performance without any difficulty.
C. Stimulating Statements
We aimed to discriminate EEG responses for agreement
and disagreement cases while reading self-relevant statements.
Self-relevant statements are those related to personal experi-
ences or opinions, and expected to generate stronger brain
signals than irrelevant sentences.
Seventy-four stimulating sentences were selected from the
Minnesota multiphasic personality inventory-II [26], one of
the most frequently used standardized psychometric tests.
All sentences were converted into Korean, a subject-object-
verb (SOV) language. Also, all sentences were ending with
only one type of verb, i.e., existence verbs such as “do exist”
and “do not exist.” Therefore, an English sentence “I do (not)
worry a great deal over money” was converted into an SOV
typology with a contents block “The experience of worrying
over money” and an ending block “Does (not) exist.” Here,
the negated sentence was formed by simply changing only the
ending block from “Does exist” to “Does not exist.”
At the design stage of the experiment, we were not sure
whether the positive and negative endings might result in dif-
ferent brain signals. Therefore, each sentence was decomposed
into two blocks: 1) the contents block and 2) the ending block,
and EEG signals with the contents blocks and ending blocks
were investigated separately. We had two hypotheses to prove
by this experiment. The first was that, as the main objective of
this paper, the implicit intentions of agreement and disagree-
ment were elicited by reading only the contents block. The
second was that the positive and negative ending blocks did
not make any difference.
D. EEG Recording and Preprocessing
The EEG data were recorded using the BrainAmp sys-
tem (Brain Products GmbH, Germany) and an EEG cap
with 32 electrodes (BrainCap) in an electromagnetically
shielded room. Thirty electrodes were placed on each sub-
ject’s scalp according to the international 10–20 system. One
electrode was positioned below subject’s left eye to record
electrooculogram for eye movement. Another electrode was
placed above subject’s left collarbone to record electrocar-
diogram. The impedance of each electrode was maintained
below 10 k.
Data were acquired at a sampling rate of 500 Hz with 60 Hz
notch filter. The EEG data were measured with a reference at
FCz electrode, but later converted into values with the aver-
age reference. High-pass filtering was implemented with 1 Hz
cutoff frequency and 0.2 Hz transition bandwidth. Independent
component analysis (ICA) based on extended Infomax algo-
rithm was used to identify artifacts. Then, artifacts from
eye blinking, eye movement, and heartbeats were manually
selected and removed from the measured data [27]–[29].
Since EEG data elicited by the contents block were of
our concern, the time reference was moved to the onset
of the contents block for each trial. Then, EEG data from
−0.2 to 1 s were extracted, and the baseline correction was
adopted by subtracting the mean amplitude within the range of
[−0.2 s, 0 s]. In Fig. 2, averages of the resulting EEG data, i.e.,
event-related potential (ERP), were shown for the agreement
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
DONG et al.: EEG-BASED CLASSIFICATION OF IMPLICIT INTENTION DURING SELF-RELEVANT SENTENCE READING
Fig. 2. Average ERPs for a representative electrode site (Cz) of subject 4 for
the agreement condition (black-dashed line) and the disagreement condition
(charcoal-gray solid line). ERPs were time-locked to the onset of the contents
block (vertical-dotted line).
and disagreement trials. The disagreement ERP showed higher
amplitudes at two time intervals, i.e., [250 ms, 400 ms] and
[750 ms, 850 ms].
E. Morlet Wavelets for Time-Frequency Representation
To classify the implicit intentions into two classes from each
single-trial EEG, instead of the averaged ERP, frequency band
powers of event-related oscillatory responses were estimated
for each trial.
There are several methods for extracting time-frequency
joint representation from time-dependent ERP data. The spec-
trogram based on fast Fourier transform of time-framed
data is the popular choice, but the time and frequency resolu-
tions become the same throughout the whole time-frequency
region. To obtain proper time and frequency resolutions for
each region, Morlet wavelet transform was adopted [30]. The
mother wavelet was designed with a seven-cycle width, and
scaled for center frequencies from 1 to 70 Hz. In this man-
ner, a time-frequency representation (TFR) was obtained for
each trial and electrode. The power values in each TFR were
converted into percentage changes relative to the power in the
baseline interval between −0.2 and 0 s prior to the onset of
the contents.
III. DATA A NALYSIS AND R ESULTS
A. Labeling of Explicit Intention
In accordance with the user responses, the recorded EEG
for each trial was labeled as agreement or disagreement.
Because some sentences contain contents related to personal
privacy, this might cause a discrepancy between implicit and
explicit answers. The social-desirability bias might cause more
answers of “to-be-viewed favorably by others” [31].
To test the validity of tagging implicit intentions with
explicit answers, a survey was conducted for 13 subjects
(seven males and six females between 20 and 30 years old),
who did not participate in the EEG experiment. For each of
the 74 statements used in the EEG experiments, the subjects
were asked to select either “be unwilling to respond honestly”
or “do not care.”
Table I summarizes the numbers of subjects who were
unwilling to respond honestly for each statement. For six state-
ments, three subjects answered that they were unwilling to
respond honestly. There were 13 and 9 statements, respec-
tively, to which two subjects and one subject showed their
unwillingness to respond honestly. Using these results, the
3
TABLE I
N UMBER OF S TATEMENTS W ITH U NWILLINGNESS
TO R ESPOND H ONESTLY
TABLE II
N UMBER OF T RIALS IN AGREEMENT AND
D ISAGREEMENT C LASSES
probability of discrepancy between the implicit and explicit
intentions was estimated as 0.055(= (3 × 6 + 2 × 13 + 1 × 9)/
(13 × 74)). This probability may provide a limitation on the
final experimental accuracy, but may not be significant to
our binary classification accuracies. However, every efforts
were made to assure anonymity of subjects throughout the
experiments for reliable and honesty responses.
The numbers of good trials for the agreement and disagree-
ment classes for each subject are shown in Table II. Although
74 trials were given to all subjects, subject 5 missed one
trial and subject 6 misunderstood the task during the first few
trials. The numbers of trials become unbalanced between the
two classes. Therefore, the overall classification accuracy was
defined as an average classification rates of the two classes.
B. Feature Selection: Time-Frequency Components
To understand the neural mechanism as well as to improve
the classification accuracy with small number of available
data, feature selection was implemented in two steps. At the
first step, several time-frequency components were selected
with high discrimination capacity between the agreement and
disagreement classes.
For this purpose, based on previous fMRI studies with sim-
ilar experiments [7], five frontal electrodes close to superior
frontal gyrus and anterior cingulate cortex were considered
as shown in Fig. 3(a). These areas were known to be related
to decision-making [32], empathic judgments [33], and self-
descriptive trait judgment [34].
The TFRs based on Morlet wavelet transforms were aver-
aged for all subjects, with agreement and disagreement classes
separately, at the five electrodes. Then, the difference of
percentage changes between the two classes was plotted in
Fig. 3(b).
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.

4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CYBERNETICS

Fig. 3. Average difference in TFRs between agreement and disagreement classes for five frontal electrodes. (a) Five considered frontal electrodes, i.e., F3, Fz,
F4, FC1, and FC2, in yellow color. (b) Percentage differences (agreement–disagreement) of Morlet wavelet-based TFRs. The x-axis and the y-axis represent
time and frequency, respectively. Boxes within the TFRs indicate the time-frequency components with significant differences. (c) Scalp topographic maps of
the five selected time-frequency components.

TABLE III
SNR OF E ACH T IME -F REQUENCY C OMPONENT

With a careful inspection for significant percentage changes

in Fig. 3(b), five time-frequency components were selected
as: 1) the gamma component (35–45 Hz) between 350 and
550 ms; 2) the beta2 component (20–26 Hz) between 300
and 450 ms; 3) the beta1 component (14–17 Hz) between
800 and 1000 ms; 4) the alpha component (9–12 Hz)
between 300 and 700 ms; and 5) the theta component (5–7 Hz) Fig. 4. Electrode (or channel) selection procedure for each time-frequency
between 400 and 1000 ms after the onset of the contents. component. Fisher scores were computed for all electrodes, and sorted in
For each time-frequency component, the signal-to-noise descending order. (a) Compute Fisher score for each channel. (b) Channel
selection based on Fisher score.
ratios (SNRs) were shown in Table III. The SNRs were calcu-
lated for each time-frequency component, but averaged over
subjects, trials, and electrodes. The noise power was estimated
frontocentral area. However, when subjects agreed, beta2 and
at the baseline time period [−0.2 s, 0 s], and the signal power
theta band activities increased at frontal area. Moreover, at
was estimated by subtracting the noise power from the total
low frequencies such as alpha and theta bands, some parietal
power. Due to the low SNR of entire time-frequency region, it
and occipital regions also showed large differences between
is advantageous to consider the specific time-frequency region.
agreement and disagreement.
Although the gamma component has negative SNR, it is still
discriminant in Fig. 3(b).
In Fig. 3(c), scalp topographic maps were shown for the five C. Feature Selection: Electrode Positions
selected time-frequency components using the average power For each of the five chosen time-frequency components, the
for each component [35]. When subjects disagreed, the aver- importance of each electrode positions were evaluated, and
age power increased in gamma, beta1, and alpha bands around only a subset was selected for efficient classification. As shown
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.

DONG et al.: EEG-BASED CLASSIFICATION OF IMPLICIT INTENTION DURING SELF-RELEVANT SENTENCE READING 5

TABLE IV
F IVE B EST E LECTRODES FOR E ACH T IME -F REQUENCY C OMPONENT BASED ON F ISHER S CORE

in Fig. 3(c), there existed some high activation differences

outside of the frontal areas, and all the 30 electrode positions
were considered.
The Fisher score is one of the most widely used measures
of feature discriminant ability [36]. For each time-frequency
component, the Fisher score for the ith electrode (or channel)
is computed as
K  i 
i 2
k=1 nk μk − μ
Fi = K  i 2
k=1 nk σk

where nk is the number of trials of the kth class, and μik and
σki denote the mean and standard deviation for the kth class at
the ith electrode, respectively. Here, K = 2 is the number of
classes. Also, μi denotes the mean for the entire data at the ith
electrode. After computing the Fisher score for all electrodes,
top M ranked electrodes were selected and used as the inputs
to a classifier. The electrode selection procedure for each time-
frequency component is summarized in Fig. 4.
Table IV summarizes the five best electrodes for each time-
frequency component. For the gamma component, the selected
electrodes were located at the frontocentral regions (F3 and
FC5 on the left and FC2 on the right), the right tempo-
ral region (T8), and the left centroparietal region (CP5). For
the beta2 component, the selected electrodes were located
at the left central regions (C3 and CP5) and frontal regions
(FC1, Fp1, and Fp2). For the beta1 component, the selected
electrodes were located at the frontocentral regions (F3 and
FC1 on the left, and F4 on the right), the right tempo-
ral region (T8), and the left parietal region (P7). For the
alpha component, the selected electrodes were located at the
frontocentral regions (Fz, FC1, and F4) and left central regions
(C3 and Cp1). For the theta component, the selected electrodes
were located at the centroparietal regions (C3 and CP5 on
the left and CP2 on the right) and the left parietal region
(P3 and P7).
For the gamma to alpha components, the frontocentral elec- Fig. 5. Training (the top plot) and testing (the bottom plot) accuracies for
trodes were found to contain the discriminating features. By each time-frequency component with increasing number of selected electrodes
using (a) linear kernel and (b) RBF kernel for binary SVM classifiers. The x-
contrast, the theta component of the centroparietal electrodes axis represents the number of selected electrodes, and the y-axis represents the
was more discriminant. Moreover, the gamma component average classification accuracy (%). Accuracies were averaged with fivefold
had higher Fisher scores, and therefore higher classification cross-validations for each subject, and then averaged again for all nine sub-
jects. The line colors darken as the band frequency increases. The red-dotted
performance than the other components. line indicates the chance level, i.e., 50%.

D. Single-Trial Classification Results EEG data. Simple linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was
Our goal was to classify users’ implicit intention into first applied, but the results were not satisfactory. Therefore,
agreement and disagreement binary classes from single-trial support vector machine (SVM) was applied with two types
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CYBERNETICS
Fig. 6. Training (the top plot) and testing (the bottom plot) accuracies
using all five time-frequency components with increasing number of selected
electrodes using a linear and RBF kernel for SVM classifiers. The x-axis repre-
sents the number of selected electrodes, and the y-axis represents the average
classification accuracy (%). Accuracies were averaged with fivefold cross-
validations for each subject, and then averaged again for all nine subjects.
The red-dotted line indicates the chance level, i.e., 50%.
of kernel functions. The LIBSVM toolbox was used in [37].
Considering the fact that LDA did not work well, the two
classes might not be linearly separable, and radial basis func-
tion (RBF) kernel was expected to perform better. The optimal
values for the SVM parameters were found through an exhaus-
tive grid search during the validation phase [38]. Due to the
small data available, fivefold cross-validation was performed
using the test data for the validation.
With the electrode selection in the previous section, the clas-
sification results were calculated as functions of the number
of selected electrodes, for each time-frequency component and
for all components.
Fig. 5 shows the training and testing accuracies versus the
number of selected electrodes for SVM classifiers with linear
and RBF kernels. As the number of electrodes increased, the
training accuracy improved for both SVMs. The testing accu-
racies for most components also increased as more electrodes
were used with the linear kernel, whereas the testing accu-
racy for the gamma component decreased when more than
20 electrodes were used. By contrast, with the RBF kernel,
the testing accuracy started to decrease from smaller num-
ber of electrodes. Actually, the gamma component with five
most discriminant electrodes showed the best performance,
at 75.5% (for these five electrodes of the gamma component,
see Table IV). Over-fitting on the training data might be the
reason.
Furthermore, all the five time-frequency components were
used for the classification. The 150 Fisher score values from
5 components and 30 electrodes were sorted, and selected from
the highest Fisher score. Fig. 6 shows the training and testing
classification rates (%) for both linear and RBF SVMs. Using
the RBF kernel, the maximum test classification rate was
TABLE V
M AXIMUM T ESTING ACCURACY (%) FOR E ACH C OMPONENT AND
C LASSIFIER . PARENTHESIS I NDICATES THE N UMBER OF
S ELECTED C HANNELS R EQUIRED TO M AKE THE
M AXIMUM T ESTING ACCURACY
obtained at 74.0% with four electrodes from gamma, beta1,
and beta2 components. However, the linear kernel required
20 electrodes to reach its highest accuracy at 64.7%. The rel-
atively poorer performance with all five components may come
from overfitting.
Table V summarizes the maximum single-trial testing accu-
racy and the number of electrodes for each time-frequency
component and with both kernel types for the SVM classifiers.
The gamma component had higher Fisher scores than the other
components, which resulted in a more accurate classification
performance.
IV. D ISCUSSION
In this paper, using single-trial multichannel EEG data, we
proposed a new method to classify human implicit intentions
into agreement and disagreement classes.
A. Concept of Implicit Intention
The term “implicit intention” in this paper refers to the
unexpressed or hidden intention. Especially, we had focused
on the agreement versus disagreement classes among the
unexpressed intentions. On the other hand, a few others had
reported lie-detection, which is related to the hidden intention.
The implicit agreement (or disagreement) to a given statement
may be regarded as the agreement (or disagreement) with
a counterpart in conversation. On the other hand, lie detec-
tion is concerned with agreement (or disagreement) to ones
expressed intention. While a vast body of research exists on
lie detection, our concept of implicit intention on agreement
versus disagreement is novel.
B. Experiment Paradigm
In most experiments concerning lie detection, subjects are
asked to tell a lie in order to create a situation where neural
activities related to lying may be assessed. However, there may
be differences between this artificially generated and truly nat-
ural cases. Our experiment was constructed to elicit subjects’
natural and reflexive intentions on self-relevant statements.
The self-relevance had been reported to generate pronounced
intention of agreement or disagreement and stronger neural
activities. Although Ruf et al. [21] had a similar experimental
paradigm, their yes thinking and no thinking were generated
by semantic violation. Our single-trial experiments yielded
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
DONG et al.: EEG-BASED CLASSIFICATION OF IMPLICIT INTENTION DURING SELF-RELEVANT SENTENCE READING
a superior classification performance in terms of classification
accuracy, which probably came from the strong and profound
neural signals to the self-relevant statements.
Our experiment was designed specifically for Korean speak-
ers, and took advantage of the SOV Korean grammar. The
stating sentence was divided into two parts: 1) sentence con-
tents and 2) ending. The sentence ending part may be negated,
ex., “does not.” It was shown that the neural activities related
to the implicit intentions of agreement and disagreement were
generated by the sentence contents. Also, the careful analy-
sis of EEG data at the sentence ending block showed that the
positive “does” and negative “does not” endings did not make
any noticeable difference in our preliminary studies. It demon-
strated that a user’s implicit intention is determined before the
sentence ending. For English speakers, the experimental design
may be modified to merge the contents and ending blocks with
only positive verbs.
C. Feature Selection in Time-Frequency Space Domain
Unlike many other researches using ERP in time domain or
band powers in frequency domain, time-frequency joint repre-
sentation was adopted in this paper. Since the ERP and band
powers may be obtained by integrating the time-frequency
spectrum in frequency and time domain, respectively, the TFR
is more informative. Also, to obtain appropriate time and fre-
quency resolutions throughout the whole time and frequency
domain, Morlet wavelet transform was implemented.
As a result, five time-frequency components were identified
to be discriminative features between the agreement and dis-
agreement classes. The gamma and theta components within
a similar latency range were also observed in the general-
knowledge violation condition for sentence comprehension
in [12] and [13]. In the context of agreement versus dis-
agreement intention, the general-knowledge violation may be
regarded as a disagreement with the propositional statements.
Also, the important electrodes were found in the same brain
areas, i.e., the frontocentral areas for the gamma component.
This similarity may come from the experimental design of
agreement versus disagreement cases. However, the beta com-
ponent was not found in the knowledge violation experiments.
This difference may result from the self-relevance versus
general knowledge of the stating sentences.
However, there is a drawback to our feature selection
method. The Fisher score was evaluated separately for each
electrode, while some combination of time, frequency, and
electrode position may contribute to the classification. One
may try every possible feature combinations. Or, before feed-
ing to the SVM classifier, one may remove the dependency
among features by using ICA. However, considering that
an overfitting occurred with only five features and all pos-
sible 150 features did not improve the testing accuracy in
Fig. 6, no significant improvement is expected from the 75.5%
classification rate with 5 gamma-band features.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, by applying Morlet-wavelet time-frequency
analysis to multichannel EEG data, it was demonstrated that
7
human implicit intentions of agreement versus disagreement
were classified with 75.5% accuracy from single-trial EEG
signals. Also, it was shown that the gamma-band power from
350 to 550 ms after the onset of stating sentence played an
important role for the classification.
These results suggest that different neuro-cognitive pro-
cesses are involved in the two implicit intentions, i.e., agree-
ment versus disagreement, when people read self-relevant
sentences. It may prove our hypothesis that agreement and
disagreement consist of an axis on human implicit inten-
tion space. Therefore, for a new intelligent human–machine
interface, one may use EEG signals to generate labels for
the audio-visual training database for the classification of
agreement versus disagreement during conversation. The other
alternative may be self-report, which is impossible to be
obtained in real-time and may not be reliable for sensitive per-
sonal issues. Therefore, although the EEG-based labels may
include some error, it may be utilized at early developmental
stage. Also, the accuracy may be further improved by online
incremental learning.
R EFERENCES
[1] J. R. Wolpaw, N. Birbaumer, D. J. McFarland, G. Pfurtscheller, and
T. M. Vaughan, “Brain-computer interfaces for communication and
control,” Clin. Neurophysiol., vol. 113, no. 6, pp. 767–791, Jun. 2002.
[2] B. Blankertz et al., “The Berlin brain-computer interface: EEG-based
communication without subject training,” IEEE Trans. Neural Syst.
Rehabil. Eng., vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 147–152, Jun. 2006.
[3] D. Coyle, G. Prasad, and T. M. McGinnity, “Faster self-organizing fuzzy
neural network training and a hyperparameter analysis for a brain–
computer interface,” IEEE Trans. Syst., Man, Cybern. B, Cybern.,
vol. 39, no. 6, pp. 1458–1471, Dec. 2009.
[4] C. Escolano, J. M. Antelis, and J. Minguez, “A telepresence mobile robot
controlled with a noninvasive brain–computer interface,” IEEE Trans.
Syst., Man, Cybern. B, Cybern., vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 793–804, Jun. 2012.
[5] L. A. Farwell and E. Donchin, “The truth will out: Interrogative
polygraphy (“lie detection”) with event−related brain potentials,”
Psychophysiology, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 531–547, Sep. 1991.
[6] C. Davatzikos et al., “Classifying spatial patterns of brain activity with
machine learning methods: Application to lie detection,” NeuroImage,
vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 663–668, Nov. 2005.
[7] S.-Y. Dong, B.-K. Kim, and S.-Y. Lee, “Implicit agreeing/disagreeing
intention while reading self-relevant sentences: A human fMRI
study,” Soc. Neurosci. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/
17470919.2015.1059362
[8] E. Başar, M. Schürmann, T. Demiralp, C. Başar-Eroglu, and
A. Ademoglu, “Event-related oscillations are ‘real brain responses’—
Wavelet analysis and new strategies,” Int. J. Psychophysiol., vol. 39,
nos. 2–3, pp. 91–127, Jan. 2001.
[9] M. C. M. Bastiaansen, J. J. A. van Berkum, and P. Hagoort, “Event-
related theta power increases in the human EEG during Online sentence
processing,” Neurosci. Lett., vol. 323, no. 1, pp. 13–16, Apr. 2002.
[10] D. Roehm, M. Schleschewsky, I. Bornkessel, S. Frisch, and H. Haider,
“Fractionating language comprehension via frequency characteristics of
the human EEG,” Neuroreport, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 409–412, Mar. 2004.
[11] D. J. Davidson and P. Indefrey, “An inverse relation between event-
related and time–frequency violation responses in sentence processing,”
Brain Res., vol. 1158, pp. 81–92, Jul. 2007.
[12] P. Hagoort, L. Hald, M. Bastiaansen, and K. M. Petersson, “Integration
of word meaning and world knowledge in language comprehension,”
Science, vol. 304, no. 5669, pp. 438–441, Apr. 2004.
[13] L. A. Hald, M. C. Bastiaansen, and P. Hagoort, “EEG theta and
gamma responses to semantic violations in Online sentence processing,”
Brain Lang., vol. 96, no. 1, pp. 90–105, Jan. 2006.
[14] R. M. Willems, R. Oostenveld, and P. Hagoort, “Early decreases in
alpha and gamma band power distinguish linguistic from visual infor-
mation during spoken sentence comprehension,” Brain Res., vol. 1219,
pp. 78–90, Jul. 2008.
 This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
8 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CYBERNETICS
[15] Y. Luo, Y. Zhang, X. Feng, and X. Zhou, “Electroencephalogram oscil-
lations differentiate semantic and prosodic processes during sentence
reading,” Neuroscience, vol. 169, no. 2, pp. 654–664, Aug. 2010.
[16] E. C. Cherry, “Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one
and with two ears,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am., vol. 25, no. 5, pp. 975–979,
Sep. 1953.
[17] K. Zhao, Q. Wu, H. D. Zimmer, and X. Fu, “Electrophysiological
correlates of visually processing subject’s own name,” Neurosci. Lett.,
vol. 491, no. 2, pp. 143–147, Mar. 2011.
[18] H. M. Gray, N. Ambady, W. T. Lowenthal, and P. Deldin, “P300 as an
index of attention to self-relevant stimuli,” J. Exp. Soc. Psychol., vol. 40,
no. 2, pp. 216–224, Mar. 2004.
[19] E. C. Fields and G. R. Kuperberg, “It’s all about you: An ERP study
of emotion and self-relevance in discourse,” NeuroImage, vol. 62, no. 1,
pp. 562–574, Aug. 2012.
[20] S. C. Johnson et al., “Neural correlates of self-reflection,” Brain,
vol. 125, no. 8, pp. 1808–1814, Aug. 2002.
[21] C. A. Ruf et al., “Semantic classical conditioning and brain–computer
interface control: Encoding of affirmative and negative thinking,” Front.
Neurosci., vol. 7, no. 23, pp. 1–13, Mar. 2013.
[22] S.-Y. Dong and S.-Y. Lee, “Recognition of human implicit intention
based on fMRI and EEG,” presented at Neuroinformat., Stockholm,
Sweden, 2013. [Online]. Available: http://www.frontiersin.org/10.3389/
conf.fninf.2013.09.00044/event_abstract
[23] S.-Y. Dong and S.-Y. Lee, “Understanding human implicit intention
while reading self-relevant sentences: An fMRI study,” in presented at
the 19th Annu. Meeting OHBM, Seattle, WA, USA, Jun. 2013.
[24] S.-Y. Dong and S.-Y. Lee, “Understanding human implicit intention
based on frontal electroencephalography (EEG),” in Proc. IJCNN,
Brisbane, QLD, Australia, Jun. 2012, pp. 1–5.
[25] S.-Y. Dong, B.-K. Kim, and S.-Y. Lee, “Decoding and predicting
implicit agreeing/disagreeing intention based on electroencephalogra-
phy (EEG),” in Neural Information Processing (LNCS 8227). Berlin,
Germany: Springer, 2013, pp. 587–594.
[26] J. N. Butcher, W. G. Dahlstrom, J. R. Graham, A. Tellegen,
and B. Kaemmer, The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory-2 (MMPI-2): Manual for Administration and Scoring.
Minneapolis, MN, USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
[27] A. Delorme, J. Palmer, J. Onton, R. Oostenveld, and S. Makeig,
“Independent EEG sources are dipolar,” PLoS One, vol. 7, Feb. 2012,
Art. ID e30135.
[28] T. W. Lee, M. Girolami, A. J. Bell, and T. J. Sejnowski, “A unifying
information-theoretic framework for independent component analysis,”
Comput. Math. Appl., vol. 39, pp. 1–21, Jun. 2000.
[29] A. Delorme and S. Makeig, “EEGLAB: An open source toolbox for
analysis of single-trial EEG dynamics including independent component
analysis,” J. Neurosci. Meth., vol. 134, no. 1, pp. 9–21, Mar. 2004.
[30] A. Grossmann and J. Morlet, “Decomposition of hardy functions into
square integrable wavelets of constant shape,” SIAM J. Math. Anal.,
vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 723–736, 1984.
[31] R. J. Fisher, “Social desirability bias and the validity of indirect
questioning,” J. Consum. Res., vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 303–315, Sep. 1993.
[32] C. S. Carter et al., “Anterior cingulate cortex, error detection, and
the online monitoring of performance,” Science, vol. 280, no. 5364,
pp. 747–749, May 1998.
[33] T. F. Farrow et al., “Investigating the functional anatomy of empathy and
forgiveness,” Neuroreport, vol. 12, no. 11, pp. 2433–2438, Aug. 2001.
[34] I. I. Goldberg, M. Harel, and R. Malach, “When the brain loses its self:
Prefrontal inactivation during sensorimotor processing,” Neuron, vol. 50,
no. 2, pp. 329–339, Apr. 2006.
[35] Z. J. Koles, “The quantitative extraction and topographic mapping of
the abnormal components in the clinical EEG,” Electroen. Clin. Neuro.,
vol. 79, no. 6, pp. 440–447, Dec. 1991.
[36] R. Duda, P. Hart, and D. Stork, Pattern Classification. New York, NY,
USA: Wiley, 2001.
[37] C. C. Chang and C. J. Lin, “LIBSVM: A library for support vector
machines,” ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol., vol. 2, no. 3, Apr. 2011.
[Online]. Available: http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm
[38] C. W. Hsu, C. C. Chang, and C. J. Lin (Apr. 2010). A Practical
Guide to Support Vector Classification. [Online]. Available:
http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/papers/guide/guide.pdf
Suh-Yeon Dong received the B.S. and M.S.
degrees from the Department of Electrical
Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science
and Technology, Daejeon, Korea, in 2010 and 2011,
respectively, where she is currently pursuing the
Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering.
Her current research interests include brain
signal processing, implicit human intention, and the
brain–computer interface.
Bo-Kyeong Kim received the B.S. degree from
the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering,
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology, Daejeon, Korea, in 2011, where she
is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical
engineering.
Her current research interests include single
EEG trial classification, feature extraction of brain
signals, and brain–computer interface.
Soo-Young Lee received the B.S. degree from Seoul
National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1975, and
the Ph.D. degree from the Polytechnic Institute of
New York University, Brooklyn, NY, USA, in 1984.
He is currently a Full Professor with the
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology, Daejeon, Korea. He has researched on
auditory models, information-theoretic processing,
proactive knowledge development, and top-down
selective attention. His current research interests
include artificial brains such as human-like intelligent systems based on
biological information processing mechanisms, and combining cognitive neu-
roscience and information theory for artificial cognitive systems.
Prof. Lee was a recipient of the International Neural Network
Society (INNS) Leadership Award in 1994, the INNS Presidential Award in
2001, and the APPNA Service Award in 2004. He joined the INNS Governing
Board in 2012. He was the President of the Asia-Pacific Neural Network
Assembly. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Natural Intelligence and the INNS
Magazine, and is on Editorial Boards of several other journals. In 1997, he
established the Brain Science Research Center, and from 1998 to 2008 he
served as the Director and Principal Investigator of the Brain Neuroinformatics
Research Program, the first interdisciplinary research program in Korea for
brain-inspired intelligent systems with perception, learning, inference, and
human-like behavior.