Neurotechnology for augmenting group decision-making

Group decision-making is a fundamental process across various domains, including healthcare, business, defence and education where collective intelligence often outperforms individual judgments. However, traditional group decisions are susceptible to biases, social influence, and inefficiencies, which can undermine their effectiveness. Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) at a time, begins to be used in able-bodied people, for instance, decision-making. BCIs offer a novel approach to augmenting group decision-making by integrating neural and behavioral signals to enhance accuracy and efficiency. Collaborative BCIs (cBCIs), which aggregate brain activity from multiple users, can objectively estimate decision confidence, enabling more effective weighting of individual inputs and reducing reliance on self-reported confidence, which is prone to bias. The proposed cBCI is widely applied in different kinds of tasks, such as spacecraft navigation, target detection and localization, visual matching, visual search, speech perception, face recognition, target detection in realistic videos, aiding pandemic scenarios. Groups assisted by the cBCI or other techniques with cBCIs demonstrate significantly better decision-making performance compared to both individuals and traditional groups of the same size using the majority rule. The thesis also mentions using (single) BCI and other techniques could benefit decision-making. For example, exploring whether subject and task-independent neural correlates of the decision-making confidence, how unimodal or bimodal cues affect the decision confidence, whether transfer-learning techniques could be used to predict the decision confidence and forming such Human-machine Teaming to improve the group decision-making performance. The post-cut effects are also useful to study the connectivity in the brain for the future. Furthermore, it examines the effects of constrained communication on individual and group decision-making several tasks. It finds that communication decreases performance, but a cBCI improves group decisions even in this scenario. In addition, the cBCI’s confidence estimates are more reliable predictors of decision accuracy than self-reported confidence, which becomes unreliable when communication is introduced. At the end of thesis, some additional ideas are proposed, which leads to better develop the BCI in the future.