Starring into the void?: Classifying Internal vs. External Attention from EEG

Abstract

For any HCI system, it would be a great advantage if it was aware of the attentional state of its user: Is he or she paying attention to external stimuli provided by the user's environment or is the user focusing his or her attention on internal mental tasks? In this paper, we propose a model for the discrimination of internal and external attention by using Electroencephalography. We describe the experiment we conducted to collect data of internal and external attention, describe our setup for classification and discuss the classifications results.