Intention concepts and brain-machine interfacing
Franziska Thinnes-Elker1,2,3†,
Olga Iljina1,4†,
John Kyle Apostolides3,5,
Felicitas Kraemer6,
Andreas Schulze-Bonhage1,
Ad Aertsen2,3 and
Tonio Ball1,3*
- 1Epilepsy Center, University Medical Center Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
- 2Institute for Biology III, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
- 3Bernstein Center Freiburg, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
- 4Hermann Paul School of Linguistics, Freiburg, Germany
- 5Juniata College, Huntingdon, PA, USA
- 6Department of Philosophy and Ethics, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, Netherlands
Intentions, including their temporal properties and semantic
content, are receiving increased attention, and neuroscientific studies
in humans vary with respect to the topography of intention-related
neural responses. This may reflect the fact that the kind of intentions
investigated in one study may not be exactly the same kind investigated
in the other. Fine-grained intention taxonomies developed in the
philosophy of mind may be useful to identify the neural correlates of
well-defined types of intentions, as well as to disentangle them from
other related mental states, such as mere urges to perform an action.
Intention-related neural signals may be exploited by brain-machine
interfaces (BMIs) that are currently being developed to restore speech
and motor control in paralyzed patients. Such BMI devices record the
brain activity of the agent, interpret (“decode”) the agent’s intended
action, and send the corresponding execution command to an artificial
effector system, e.g., a computer cursor or a robotic arm. In the
present paper, we evaluate the potential of intention concepts from
philosophy of mind to improve the performance and safety of BMIs based
on higher-order, intention-related control signals. To this end, we
address the distinction between future-, present-directed, and motor
intentions, as well as the organization of intentions in time,
specifically to what extent it is sequential or hierarchical. This has
consequences as to whether these different types of intentions can be
expected to occur simultaneously or not. We further illustrate how it
may be useful or even necessary to distinguish types of intentions
exposited in philosophy, including yes- vs. no-intentions and oblique
vs. direct intentions, to accurately decode the agent’s intentions from
neural signals in practical BMI applications.
Keywords: BMI, BCI, action intention, intentional, philosophy of mind
Citation: Thinnes-Elker F, Iljina O, Apostolides JK,
Kraemer F, Schulze-Bonhage A, Aertsen A and Ball T (2012) Intention
concepts and brain-machine interfacing. Front. Psychology 3:455. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00455
Received: 09 August 2012; Accepted: 09 October 2012;
Published online: 09 November 2012.
Edited by:
Rico Fischer, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
Reviewed by:
Don Tucker, Electrical Geodesics, Inc. and the University of Oregon, USA
Malte Schilling, International Computer Science Institute Berkeley, USA
Copyright: © 2012 Thinnes-Elker, Iljina,
Apostolides, Kraemer, Schulze-Bonhage, Aertsen and Ball. This is an
open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums,
provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any
copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.
*Correspondence: Tonio Ball, Epilepsy Center,
University Medical Center Freiburg, Engelbergerstr. 21, 79106 Freiburg,
Germany. e-mail: tonio.ball@uniklinik-freiburg.de
†Franziska Thinnes-Elker and Olga Iljina have contributed equally to this work.