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

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.

ERP decoding webinars on June 29 and June 30

Recordings of the webinars are no longer available. However, we are working on a plan to present these webinars again in late summer or early fall. We are also planning webinars on other topics. If you are interested in getting updates about future events, please join our email list.

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We will be giving a pair of webinars on ERP decoding that are open to the worldwide ERP community as part of our Virtual ERP Boot Camp.

Part 1 (Monday, June 29, 8:00 AM Pacific Time) will be a general overview of how ERP decoding works, what kinds of things can be decoded, and the strengths and weaknesses of decoding relative to traditional univariate ERP analysis methods. This part will be led by Steve Luck.

Part 2 (Tuesday, June 30, 8:00 AM Pacific Time) will be a how-to workshop led by Gi-Yeul Bae (who developed our decoding approach) and Aaron Simmons (the lab manager for the Luck Lab). They will go through our decoding pipeline line by line so that you’ll be able to easily apply it to your own data. Everything is in Matlab, using a bit of EEGLAB and ERPLAB and a lot of custom code that can be easily adapted for a broad range of experiments. Part 2 will assume that you’ve done Part 1 and that you have at least a little Matlab coding experience.

We expect that each part will be approximately 2 hours (but this is just an estimate). We realize that the timing will not be appropriate for some time zones, but 8:00 AM here in California is about the best we can realistically do.

We will make recordings available on erpinfo.org for one week following each webinar. The links should be available by the end of the day (California time) on July 1.

We will focus on decoding for basic science and preclinical research, not for engineering applications. For example, our methods are not very useful for brain-computer interfaces., but they can be incredibly powerful for answering scientific questions about the human mind and brain. For an overview of our approach and links to recent papers, see this blog post.

Inquiries should be directed to erpbootcamp@gmail.com.

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.

2020 ERP Boot Camp Cancelled Because of Covid-19 Pandemic

We are very sorry to announce that, due to the covid-19 pandemic, we are cancelling the 2020 ERP Boot Camp that was originally scheduled for June 22 – July 1 in San Diego. We really love running the boot camp, and we will greatly miss the opportunity to meet you and provide this important training.

As an alternative, we are planning to host a few larger-scale webinars. Most of these will be open to anyone (perhaps with limited, first-come/first-served registration). Stay tuned to this web site for announcements.

We plan to hold the next regular ERP Boot Camp in the summer of 2021 in San Diego (dates to be determined). Applications for the 2020 boot camp will not automatically carry over to the 2021 boot camp. The application portal will open approximately January 1, 2021.

If you would like to schedule a 2- or 3-day mini ERP boot camp at your institution, click here information.