Announcing the Release of ERP CORE: An Open Resource for Human Event-Related Potential Research
/We are excited to announce the official release of the ERP CORE, a freely available online resource we developed for the ERP community. The ERP CORE was designed to help everyone from novice to experienced ERP researchers advance their program of research in several distinct ways.
The ERP CORE includes: 1) experiment control scripts for 6 optimized ERP paradigms that collectively elicit 7 ERP components (N170, MMN, N2pc, N400, P3, LRP, and ERN) in just one hour of recording time, 2) raw and processed data from 40 neurotypical young adults in each paradigm, 3) EEG/ERP data processing pipelines and analysis scripts in EEGLAB and ERPLAB Matlab Toolboxes, and 4) a broad set of ERP results and EEG/ERP data quality measures for comparison across laboratories.
A paper describing the ERP CORE is available here, and the online resource files are accessible here. Below we detail just some of the ways in which ERP CORE may be useful to ERP researchers.
The ERP CORE provides a comprehensive introduction to the analysis of ERP data, including all processing steps, parameters, and the order of operations used in ERP data analysis. As a result, this resource can be used by novice ERP researchers to learn how to analyze ERP data, or by researchers of all levels who wish to learn ERP data analysis using the open source EEGLAB and ERPLAB Matlab Toolboxes. More advanced researchers can use the annotated Matlab scripts as a starting point for scripting their own analyses. Our analysis parameters, such as time windows and electrode sites for measurement, could also be used as a priori parameters in future studies, reducing researcher degrees of freedom.
With data for 7 ERP components in 40 neurotypical research participants, the provided ERP CORE data set could be reanalyzed by other researchers to test new hypotheses or analytic techniques, or to compare the effectiveness of different data processing procedures across multiple ERP components. This may be particularly useful to researchers right now, given the limitations many of us are facing in collecting new data sets.
The experiment control scripts for each of the ERP CORE paradigms we designed are provided in Presentation software for use by other researchers. Each paradigm was specifically designed to robustly elicit a specific ERP component in a brief (~10 min) recording. The experiment control scripts were programmed to make it incredibly easy for other researchers to directly use the tasks in their laboratories. For example, the stimuli can be automatically scaled to the same sizes as in our original recording by simply inputting the height, width, and viewing distance of the monitor you wish to use to collect data in your lab. The experiment control scripts are also easy to modify using the parameters feature in Presentation, which allows changes to be made to many features of the task (e.g., number of trials, stimulus duration) without modifying the code. Thus, the ERP CORE paradigms could be added on to an existing study, or be used as a starting point for the development of new paradigms.
We provide several metrics quantifying the noise levels of our EEG/ERP data that may be useful as a comparison for both novice and experienced ERP researchers to evaluate their laboratory set-up and data collection procedures. The quality of EEG/ERP data plays a big role in statistical power; however, it can be difficult to determine the overall quality of ERP data in published papers. This makes it difficult for a given researcher to know whether their data quality is comparable to that of other labs. The ERP CORE provides measures of data quality for our data, as well as analysis scripts and procedures that other researchers can use to calculate these same data quality metrics on their own data.
These are just some of the many ways we anticipate that the ERP CORE will be used by ERP researchers. We are excited to see what other uses you may find for this resource and to hear feedback on the ERP CORE from the ERP community.