EEG-based Evaluation of Enjoyment Emotion during cognitive-motor task

Remote communication has become a widely used means of communication in modern society. However, the limited non-verbal information can make remote communication difficult, and there is a need to develop technologies that quantitatively evaluate and transfer users' emotional information for smoother communication. This study focuses on enjoyment, one of the positive emotions crucial for communication, and investigates EEG biomarkers for estimating enjoyment during cognitive-motor tasks. EEG was measured at six channels in 12 healthy young adults while they performed cognitive-motor tasks at five different difficulty levels. The task was presented as an immersive virtual reality game to simulate a virtual workspace with adjustable task difficulty. Participants answered a questionnaire to evaluate their "enjoyment" level for each gameplay. A stepwise regression analysis resulted in a linear model equation that could estimate enjoyment levels across all participants based on normalized EEG power values. This model was validated using leave-one-participant-out cross-validation, demonstrating its effectiveness in predicting enjoyment. Our findings suggest the importance of left parietal electrophysiological activity for estimating the positive emotion of enjoyment.