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：脑机接口（BCI）的一个主要目标是为严重运动障碍患者（如闭锁综合征患者）恢复沟通和控制能力。这些患者仅保留有限的眼球和眼睑运动。然而，他们尚未从高效的BCI解决方案中受益。非侵入式BCI可使用的信号包括：mu节律和beta节律去同步化、诱发电位和慢皮层电位。无论采用何种信号，临床研究均显示，与健康受试者相比，严重受损患者的表现显著下降。有趣的是，控制原理始终相同，即用（隐蔽的）注意力指令替代无法执行的（显性）运动。基于注意力的前运动理论、关于空间注意力功能解剖的神经影像学发现、临床观察以及近期针对动作和知觉的注意计算模型，我们探讨以下假设：这些患者经历了负向可塑性，导致其损伤从显性注意力过程扩展到隐蔽注意力过程。