Abstract
Decoding the human brain using non-invasive methods is a significant challenge. This study aims to enhance electroencephalography (EEG) decoding by developing of machine learning methods. Specifically, we propose the novel, attention-based Patched Brain Transformer model to achieve this goal. The model exhibits flexibility regarding the number of EEG channels and recording duration, enabling effective pre-training across diverse datasets. We investigate the effect of data augmentation methods and pre-training on the training process. To gain insights into the training behavior, we incorporate an inspection of the architecture. We compare our model with state-of-the-art models and demonstrate superior performance using only a fraction of the parameters. The results are achieved with supervised pre-training, coupled with time shifts as data augmentation for multi-participant classification on motor imagery datasets.