ERP components analysis of selective attention to auditory signals in meaningful or meaningless noise using adaptive correlation filter.

Open offices that make effective use of limited space and encourage dialogue, interaction, and collaboration among employees, are becoming an increasingly. However, productive work-related conversation might actually decrease the performance of other employees within earshot more so than other random, meaningless noises. On the other hands, it is well known that the Event-Related Potential (ERP) in the brain wave elicited by internal or external stimuli are related to the operation of selective attention. The present experiment was designed to determine the effects of meaningfulness of external noise on ERP in the auditory odd-ball paradigms. First, in order to decide on a template of adaptive correlation filter, multivariate analysis such as the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for ERP components was performed. Next, performance of algorithm on adaptive correlation filter for estimating average waveform of ERPs was evaluated. Furthermore, differences in the ERP components due to the meaningfulness of external noise were examined.