EEG-based Cognitive Load Classification using Feature Masked Autoencoding and Emotion Transfer Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cognitive load, the amount of mental effort required for task completion, plays an important role in performance and decision-making outcomes, making its classification and analysis essential in various sensitive domains. In this paper, we present a new solution for the classification of cognitive load using electroencephalogram (EEG). Our model uses a transformer architecture employing transfer learning between emotions and cognitive load. We pre-train our model using self-supervised masked autoencoding on emotion-related EEG datasets and use transfer learning with both frozen weights and fine-tuning to perform downstream cognitive load classification. To evaluate our method, we carry out a series of experiments utilizing two publicly available EEG-based emotion datasets, namely SEED and SEED-IV, for pre-training, while we use the CL-Drive dataset for downstream cognitive load classification. The results of our experiments show that our proposed approach achieves strong results and outperforms conventional single-stage fully supervised learning. Moreover, we perform detailed ablation and sensitivity studies to evaluate the impact of different aspects of our proposed solution. This research contributes to the growing body of literature in affective computing with a focus on cognitive load, and opens up new avenues for future research in the field of cross-domain transfer learning using self-supervised pre-training.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".