  One of the challenges in modeling cognitive events from electroencephalogram
(EEG) data is finding representations that are invariant to inter- and
intra-subject differences, as well as to inherent noise associated with such
data. Herein, we propose a novel approach for learning such representations
from multi-channel EEG time-series, and demonstrate its advantages in the
context of mental load classification task. First, we transform EEG activities
into a sequence of topology-preserving multi-spectral images, as opposed to
standard EEG analysis techniques that ignore such spatial information. Next, we
train a deep recurrent-convolutional network inspired by state-of-the-art video
classification to learn robust representations from the sequence of images. The
proposed approach is designed to preserve the spatial, spectral, and temporal
structure of EEG which leads to finding features that are less sensitive to
variations and distortions within each dimension. Empirical evaluation on the
cognitive load classification task demonstrated significant improvements in
classification accuracy over current state-of-the-art approaches in this field.
