Registration is now full for the 2024 ERP Boot Camp

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The demand for the 2024 ERP Boot Camp was far beyond our expectations, and we reached our maximum registration of 30 people within one day. We already have a waiting list of over 30 people, so we have closed the registration site.

We realize that this is very disappointing to many people. We hope to offer another workshop like this next summer, or possibly earlier.

If you would like to get announcements about upcoming boot camps and webinars, you should join our email list.

You may also consider hosting a Mini ERP Boot Camp at your institution (in person or over Zoom).

Important Changes to the 2024 ERP Boot Camp

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We are disappointed to announce that we will not be holding a regular 10-day ERP Boot Camp this summer.

We have held Boot Camps nearly every summer since 2007, supported by a series of generous grants from NIMH that allowed us to provide scholarships for all attendees. Unfortunately, although our recent renewal proposal received extremely positive reviews and scores, we were recently given the surprising and disappointing news that the renewal will not be funded this year. We believe that the ERP Boot Camp provides essential training to the field, and we will continue to pursue financial support to continue holding 10-day ERP Boot Camps in the future.

In the meantime, we have partial funding that will allow us to hold a 5-day ERP Boot Camp this summer from July 8-12, 2024 in Davis, California. The workshop will include 5-days of lectures and activities on EEG and ERP measures, including practical and theoretical issues.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to provide scholarships to pay for travel and lodging costs, and we must charge a registration fee. We are very sorry if this causes a hardship.

We are no longer taking applications through our application portal. Instead of a competitive application process, we will simply accept the first 30 people who complete the registration process and pay the registration fee. This provides an opportunity to attend for individuals who might otherwise not make it through our ordinary application process, which is highly competitive.

The registration fee will be $1000 (or $900 for people who register by April 15). The registration fee will cover 6 nights in a single occupancy hotel room (arriving July 7 and departing July 13), daily breakfast at the hotel, a catered lunch for each day of the workshop, and a group dinner. You must pay the registration fee with a credit card when you register. There are no exceptions to the registration fee policy.

Registration is now open at https://na.eventscloud.com/793175.

Given that we will accept the first 30 registrants, we encourage you to register as soon as possible. Registration will close on May 20, but we anticipate that the workshop will be filled up long before then.

You must pay for your own transportation to Davis. Davis is approximately 20 minutes away from the Sacramento Airport (SMF). You can take the Davis Airporter shuttle service or a rideshare service from SMF to Davis. If you are coming from outside North America, you may want to fly into the San Francisco airport (SFO), which is 135 km (84 miles) from Davis. We recommend taking the Davis Airporter from SFO to Davis.

ERP Decoding for Everyone: Software and Webinar

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You can access the recording here.
You can access the final PDF of the slides here.
You can access the data here.

fMRI research has used decoding methods for over 20 years. These methods make it possible to decode what an individual is perceiving or holding in working memory on the basis of the pattern of BOLD activity across voxels. Remarkably, these methods can also be applied to ERP data, using the pattern of voltage across electrode sites rather than the pattern of activity across voxels to decode the information being represented by the brain (see this previous blog post). For example, ERPs can be used to decode the identity of a face that is being perceived, the emotional valence of a scene, the identity and semantic category of a word, and the features of an object that is being maintained in working memory. Moreover, decoding methods can be more sensitive than traditional methods for detecting conventional ERP effects (e.g., whether a word is semantically related or unrelated to a previous word in an N400 paradigm).

So far, these methods have mainly been used by a small set of experts. We aim to change that with the upcoming Version 10 of ERPLAB Toolbox. This version of ERPLAB will contain an ERP decoding tool that makes it trivially easy for anyone who knows how to do conventional ERP processing to take advantage of the power of decoding. It should be available in mid-July at our GitHub site. You can join the ERPLAB email list to receive an announcement when this version is released. Please do not contact us with questions until it has been released and you have tried using it.

On July 25, 2023, we will hold a 2-hour Zoom webinar to explain how decoding works at a conceptual level and show how to implement in ERPLAB Toolbox. The webinar will begin at 9:00 AM Pacific Time (California), 12:00 PM Eastern Time (New York), 5:00 PM British Summer Time (London), 6:00 PM Central European Summer Time (Berlin).

The webinar is co-sponsored by the ERP Boot Camp and the Society for Psychophysiological Research. It is completely free, but you must register in advance at https://ucdavis.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrc-CtpzorEtBSmZXJINOlLJB9ZR0evpr4. Once you register, you will receive an email with your own individual Zoom link.

We will make a recording available a few days after the webinar on the ERPinfo.org web site.

Please direct any questions about the webinar to erpbootcamp@gmail.com.

New Book: Applied ERP Data Analysis

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I’m excited to announce my new book, Applied ERP Data Analysis. It’s available online FOR FREE on the LibreTexts open source textbook platform. You can cite it as: Luck, S. J. (2022). Applied Event-Related Potential Data Analysis. LibreTexts. https://doi.org/10.18115/D5QG92

The book is designed to be read online, but LibreTexts has a tool for creating a PDF. You can then print the PDF if you prefer to read on paper.

I’ve aimed the book at beginning and intermediate ERP researchers. I assume that you already know the basic concepts behind ERPs, which you can learn from my free online Intro to ERPs course (which takes 3-4 hours to complete).

Whereas my previous book focuses on conceptual issues, the new book focuses on how to implement these concepts with real data. Most of the book consists of exercises in which you process data from the ERP CORE, a set of six ERP paradigms that yield seven different components (P3b, N400, MMN, N2pc, N170, ERN, LRP). Learn by doing!

With real data, you must deal with all kinds of weird problems and make many decisions. The book will teach you principled approaches to solving these problems and making optimal decisions.

Side note: my approach in this book was inspired by Mike X Cohen’s excellent book, Analyzing Neural Time Series Data: Theory and Practice.

You will analyze the data using EEGLAB and ERPLAB, which are free open source Matlab toolboxes. Make sure to download version 9 of ERPLAB. (You may need to buy Matlab, but many institutions provide free or discounted licenses for students.) Although you will learn a lot about these specific software packages, the exercises and accompanying text are designed to teach broader concepts that will translate to any software package (and any ERP paradigm). The logic is much more important than the software!

One key element of the approach, however, is currently ERPLAB-specific. Specifically, the book frequently asks whether a given choice increases or decreases the data quality of the averaged ERPs, as quantified with the Standardized Measurement Error (SME). If this approach makes sense to you, but you prefer a different analysis package, you should encourage the developers of that package to implement SME. All our code is open source, so translating it to a different package should be straightforward. If enough people ask, they will listen!

The book also contains a chapter on scripting, plus tons of example scripts. You don’t have to write scripts for the other chapters. But learning some simple scripting will make you more productive and increase the quality, innovation, and reproducibility of your research.

I made the book free and open source so that I could give something back to the ERP community, which has given me so much over the years. But I’ve discovered two downsides to making the book free. First, there was no copy editor, so there are probably tons of typos and other errors. Please shoot me an email if you find an error. (But I can’t realistically provide tech support if you have trouble with the software.) Second, there is no marketing budget, so please spread the word to friends, colleagues, students, and billionaire philanthropists.

This book was also designed for use in undergrad and grad courses. The LibreTexts platform makes it easy for you to create a customized version of the book. You can reorder or delete sections or whole chapters. And you can add new sections or edit any of the existing text. It’s published with a CC-BY license, so you can do anything you want with it as long as you provide an attribution to the original source. And if you don’t like some of the recommendations I make in the book, you can just change it to say whatever you like! For example, you can add a chapter titled “Why Steve Luck is wrong about filtering.”

If you are a PI: the combination of the online course, this book, and the resources provided by PURSUE give you a great way to get new students started in the lab. I’m hoping this makes it easier for faculty to get more undergrads involved in ERP research. 

Pre- and post-conference workshops at virtual SPR meeting

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We will be holding both pre- and post-conference workshops at this year’s virtual SPR meeting.

The pre-conference workshop will be a Mini ERP Boot Camp presented by Steve Luck (click here for details). Participants will first complete our free online Introduction to ERPs course. We will then have a series of three 4-hour synchronous online sessions (October 4, 5, and 6). These sessions will include lectures on more advanced topics and plenty of opportunity for interactive Q&A. Attendance requires registering for the SPR meeting and paying an additional workshop fee. Click here for the registration site.

The post-conference workshop will be a webinar on ERP decoding presented by Steve Luck, Gi-Yeul Bae, and Aaron Simmons (click here and scroll down for details). It will be a slightly updated version of the decoding webinars we gave in June. Attendance is free for meeting registrants but requires additional pre-registration. Click here for the registration site.

We will also be presenting a poster on our new metric of ERP data quality (Poster 3-085, Friday, October 9, 2020, 1:30 p.m.-2:30 p.m. EDT).

New resources for teaching about ERPs (especially for remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic)

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Will you be teaching a course about ERPs (or a broader course with significant ERP content) this year? Will you need to be teaching remotely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic? Are you concerned that you and your students will suffer from Zoom fatigue if you try to replace all your in-person classes with synchronous Zoom meetings? If so, we have some resources that might help!

We’ve created a free, fully online “Introduction to ERPs” course. It’s designed for people who want to be able to read and evaluate ERP studies or who need to get a basic background prior to learning to conduct ERP research. It can be accessed at https://courses.erpinfo.org/courses/Intro-to-ERPs.

The main goal of this blog post is to let you know that you can use any or all of the individual materials for this course in the courses you teach. These materials should be particularly helpful if you’re teaching remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic (but I think you’ll find them useful even after the pandemic). You can access the materials at https://erpinfo.org/intro-to-erps-course-materials.

All of the course materials have been released with a Creative Commons license so that you can use them in any way you want. You just need to provide an attribution (“by Steven J. Luck, https://erpinfo.org/”).

The course consists primarily of a series of 5-minute lecture videos hosted on YouTube (including closed captioning for ADA compliance). You can preview the videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXKXgcv8muTKKSReNVWsOUBiIOvinSIrD

The videos are organized into “chapters,” each of which contains 4-8 videos. You can use any or all of them. If you’re going to use more than a few, we recommend that you keep them in their current order. You can see a table of contents here.

The first five chapters focus on what ERPs are and how they’re used, and the last three chapters focus on the methodological information that students need to learn so that they can read, understand, and critically evaluate ERP papers and/or start working in an ERP lab.

Each lecture video is followed by 1-2 quiz questions (which are very important for keeping the students engaged and maximizing their understanding and retention of the materials). 

Each chapter also includes a PDF with lecture notes for that chapter. 

We can provide you with links to the videos, the lecture notes (in PDF or PowerPoint format), files containing the quiz questions, transcripts of the videos, etc. If you use the Canvas learning management system, we can also provide the materials in a format that you can import with a few keystrokes.

We’ve also provided a special version of the first lecture video designed for undergrad courses at other colleges and universities. If you’d like, we can work with you to provide a custom introductory video to make it seem even more natural that your course includes lecture videos provided by a professor from a different university.

Most of the materials are available for download at https://erpinfo.org/intro-to-erps-course-materials. Some of the course materials (e.g., the quiz questions and answers) are on a password-protected web site so that your students won’t find them. We can give you access to this site.

Questions and requests for materials can be directed to Steve Luck (sjluck@ucdavis.edu). I really want people to take advantage of these materials, so don’t hesitate to contact me!

I’m planning to use these videos myself in an undergraduate-level ERP course that I’ll be developing next year. By having the students watch these lecture videos outside of class, I’ll be able to focus the class meetings on discussing journal articles and on teaching students to analyze ERP data (using the ERP CORE data). The lecture videos are designed to give the students the background knowledge necessary to read and critically evaluate ERP papers. One of the chapters goes through the methods section of an actual ERP paper, explaining every typical step of recording and analysis. And the final chapter goes through 10 common problems in ERP studies so that the students will know what to look for when they’re critically evaluating a paper. Toward the end of the term, I’ll have students find ERP papers on topics that they find interesting and write reviews of them as if they were journal submissions. This is something I’d ordinarily reserve for a grad course, but I’m pretty sure that my UC Davis juniors and seniors will be able to handle this after watching these videos and going through several papers in class.

Webinar on the ERP CORE

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Note: This webinar was originally scheduled for August 12, but it has been rescheduled for August 26.

We will be holding a webinar on the ERP CORE, a freely available online resource we developed for the ERP community.

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.

Check out this blog post for more information about the ERP CORE and how you can use it.

The webinar will be presented by Emily Kappenman, and it will be held on Wednesday, August 26 at 9:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time (GMT-7). We expect that it will last 60-90 minutes.

During the webinar, we will (a) provide an overview of the ERP CORE paradigms; (b) introduce the data set, analysis files, and Matlab scripts provided in the resource; and (c) describe some ways that you might use the ERP CORE in your research.

Advance registration is required and will be limited to the first 950 registrants. You can register at https://ucdavis.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_BlozaZr-QeW6htlBqQXtpQ.

When you register, you will immediately receive an email with an individualized Zoom link. If you do not see the email, check your spam folder. If you still don’t see it, you may have entered your email address incorrectly.

If you can’t attend, we will make a recording available for 1 week after the webinar. The link to the recording will be provided at https://erpinfo.org/virtual-boot-camp within 24 hours of the end of the webinar. You do NOT need to register to watch the recording.

Questions can be directed to erpbootcamp@gmail.com.

Webinar on Standardized Measurement Error (a universal measure of ERP data quality)

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We will be holding a webinar on our new universal measure of ERP data quality, which call the Standardized Measurement Error (SME). Check out this previous blog post for an overview of the SME and how you can use it.

The webinar will be presented by Steve Luck, and it will be held on Wednesday, August 5 at 8:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time (GMT-7). We expect that it will last 60-90 minutes. The timing is designed to allow the largest number of people to attend (even though it will be pretty early in the morning here in California!).

We will cover the basic logic behind the SME, how it can be used by ERP researchers, and how to calculate it for your own data using ERPLAB Toolbox (v8 and higher).

If you can’t attend, we will make a recording available for 1 week after the webinar. The link to the recording will be provided on the Virtual ERP Boot Camp page within 24 hours of the end of the webinar.

Advance registration is required and will be limited to the first 950 registrants. You can register at https://ucdavis.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_LYlHHglWT2mkegGQdtr-Gg. You do NOT need to register to watch the recording.

When you register, you will immediately receive an email with an individualized Zoom link. If you do not see the email, check your spam folder. If you still don’t see it, you may have entered your email address incorrectly.

Questions can be directed to erpbootcamp@gmail.com.

Now available: Protocol for reducing COVID-19 transmission risk in EEG research

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Simmons, A. M., & Luck, S. J. (2020). Protocol for Reducing COVID-19 Transmission Risk in EEG Research. Protocol Exchange. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.pex-974/v1

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a pause in data collection for EEG research throughout much of the world. As conditions improve in some regions, many researchers would like to resume data collection. However, because the application of EEG electrodes typically involves close and prolonged exposure between the experimenter and the research participant, there will be some risk of viral infection in EEG experiments until there is an effective and widely used vaccine. It is therefore important to develop effective mitigation methods than can reduce the risks so that they are comparable to the risks that individuals will face in their daily lives (e.g., when visiting the grocery store or getting a haircut).

Toward that end, we created this protocol for reducing COVID-19 transmission risk in EEG research. We created this protocol with feedback from local EEG/ERP researchers, from neurologists who have experience with clinical EEG recordings, and from the worldwide EEG/ERP research community. The protocol is designed for use in relatively simple experimental paradigms with adult participants, but it could be easily adapted for other populations and paradigms. It could also be adapted for use with other recording methods. We assume that each researcher will carefully read the protocol and adapt it to local conditions.

If you use/adapt our protocol, please cite it!

Important: We are not implying that researchers in all locations should resume EEG recordings at this time. Resumption of research will depend on your local conditions and the rules imposed by your institution and your local, regional, and national governing bodies. However, once it is ethical and allowable for you to resume research, we hope that this protocol will help you conduct your research in a way that is safe for both laboratory personnel and research participants.