Decoding silent reading from EEG: open-vocabulary word retrieval from non-invasive brain signals

Decoding silent reading from non-invasive EEG

A new study demonstrates that open-vocabulary word-level information can be decoded from non-invasive EEG during silent reading. Using a contrastive decoder trained on about 240,000 word presentations from a single participant over 49 hours, the model achieved above-chance top-10 retrieval for words, including mid-frequency and rare ones, with performance scaling log-linearly with data volume. Removing occipital electrodes reduced word decoding but not context tracking, and control analyses separated lexical decoding from narrative context and positional priors.