Would Motor-Imagery based BCI user training benefit from more women experimenters?
This addresses a potential social influence issue in BCI training for users and researchers, but it is incremental as it builds on known experimenter effects.
The study investigated whether the gender of experimenters affects motor-imagery BCI user training performance, finding that women experimenters may positively influence participants' progress compared to men experimenters, with an interaction observed between participant gender, experimenter gender, and progress over runs.
Mental Imagery based Brain-Computer Interfaces (MI-BCI) are a mean to control digital technologies by performing MI tasks alone. Throughout MI-BCI use, human supervision (e.g., experimenter or caregiver) plays a central role. While providing emotional and social feedback, people present BCIs to users and ensure smooth users' progress with BCI use. Though, very little is known about the influence experimenters might have on the results obtained. Such influence is to be expected as social and emotional feedback were shown to influence MI-BCI performances. Furthermore, literature from different fields showed an experimenter effect, and specifically of their gender, on experimental outcome. We assessed the impact of the interaction between experi-menter and participant gender on MI-BCI performances and progress throughout a session. Our results revealed an interaction between participants gender, experimenter gender and progress over runs. It seems to suggest that women experimenters may positively influence partici-pants' progress compared to men experimenters.