Anticipation increases the efficiency of daily tasks by partial advance activation of neural substrates involved in it. Here we develop a method for the recognition of electroencephalogram (EEG) correlates of this activation as early as possible on single trials which is essential for Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI). We explore various features from the EEG recorded in a Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) paradigm. We also develop a novel technique called Time Aggregation of Classification

more »

... C) for fast and reliable decisions that combines the posterior probabilities of several classifiers trained with features computed from temporal blocks of EEG until a certainty threshold is reached. Experiments with 9 naive subjects performing the CNV experiment with GO and NOGO conditions with an inter-stimulus interval of 4 s show that the performance of the TAC method is above 70% for four subjects, around 60% for two other subjects, and random for the remaining subjects. On average over all subjects, more than 50% of the correct decisions are made at 2 s, without needing to wait until 4 s.