Effects of Sequence Order on Motor Imagery Based on Observing and Delayed Matching Task

Motor Imagery (MI) is one of the widely used paradigms for BCI, and its signal is an endogenous EEG signal that is not dependent on external stimuli. The performance of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) based on motor imagery is influenced by the way people imagine. Action sequences are the basic units for imitating, learning, and remembering motor behaviors, and it is unclear whether action sequences affect MI-BCI. This study proposes a task paradigm with different sequence order to investigate the effect of sequence order on MI by guiding people through images and videos for action observation (AO) and MI. The MI performance of four subjects is analyzed under different sequence order. The test results show that different sequence order leads to different MI classification accuracy, with positive sequence acting with 9.69% higher MI classification accuracy than negative sequence (p < 0.05). The study shows that the sequence order has a significant effect on MI. It is expected that the study in this paper may provide a new perspective for improving MI—BCI imaging.