A major objective of Brain-Computer interfaces (BCI) is to restore communication and control in patients with severe motor impairments, like people with Locked-in syndrome. These patients are left only with limited eye and eyelid movements. However, they do not benefit from efficient BCI solutions, yet. Different signals can be used as commands for non-invasive BCI: mu and beta rhythm desynchronization, evoked potentials and slow cortical potentials. Whatever the signal, clinical studies show a dramatic loss of performance in severely impaired patients compared to healthy subjects. Interestingly, the control principle is always the same, namely the replacement of an impossible (overt) movement by a (covert) attentional command. Drawing from the premotor theory of attention, from neuroimaging findings about the functional anatomy of spatial attention, from clinical observations and from recent computational accounts of attention for both action and perception, we explore the hypothesis that these patients undergo negative plasticity that extends their impairment from overt to covert attentional processes.

翻译：大脑-计算机界面(BCI)的一个主要目标是恢复有严重运动障碍的病人的通信和控制,如患有封闭综合症的人。这些病人只能保持有限的眼睛和眼皮运动。然而,他们并没有从高效的BCI解决方案中获益。不同的信号可以用作非侵入性BCI的指令:肌肉和贝蒂节奏脱节、激发的潜力和缓慢的皮质潜力。不管信号如何,临床研究表明严重受损的病人的性能与健康对象相比都急剧下降。有趣的是,控制原则总是一样,即用(隐蔽的)注意力指令取代不可能(公开)的(公开)运动。从关于注意的功能解剖学的神经图学理论,从临床观察和最近对行动和感知的注意计算记录中,我们探讨这些病人的负性塑料性从表面到隐蔽的注意力过程。