Curiosity cloning: neural analysis of scientific knowledge

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are indicators of brain activity related to cognitive processes. They can be de- tected from EEG signals and thus constitute an attractive non-invasive option to study cognitive information pro- cessing. The P300 wave is probably the most celebrated example of an event-related potential and it is classically studied in connection to the odd-ball paradigm experi- mental protocol, able to consistently provoke the brain wave. We propose the use of P300 detection to identify the scientific interest in a large set of images and train a computer with machine learning algorithms using the subject’s responses to the stimuli as the training data set. As a first step, we here describe a number of experiments designed to relate the P300 brain wave to the cognitive processes related to placing a scientific judgment on a picture and to study the number of images per seconds that can be processed by such a system.