Text Sequence Stimulation for High-Speed and Comfortable SSVEP-BCI

Steady-state visual evoked potential brain–computer interfaces offer a high-speed communication channel. However, traditional steady-state visual evoked potential paradigms often rely on strong flickering visual stimulation, which can lead to substantial visual fatigue. Moreover, the electroencephalography responses evoked by brightness flicker are spatially constrained and are primarily associated with occipital visual processing. This study presents a novel text sequence stimulation paradigm that combines periodic visual stimulation with orthographic information and elicits distinct occipital and occipitotemporal scalp response patterns relative to conventional brightness flicker. Frequency-sweep experiments were conducted to investigate the temporal, spatial, and spectral characteristics of the evoked responses. A comparison experiment further showed that text sequence stimulation is less sensitive to variations in stimulus size and luminance than conventional brightness flicker. Based on these findings, a 40-target speller was developed and validated through online experiments. The proposed paradigm achieved an information transfer rate of 235.12 ± 30.12 bits/min while significantly improving user comfort, as confirmed by questionnaire evaluations. These results suggest that text sequence stimulation offers a practical design direction for high-speed and more comfortable visual brain–computer interface.