EPOS: EEG Processing Open-Source Scripts

Abstract

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BackgroundSince the replication crisis, standardization has become even more important in psychological science and neuroscience. As a result, many methods are being reconsidered, and researchers’ degrees of freedom in these methods are being discussed as a potential source of inconsistencies across studies.New MethodWith the aim of addressing these subjectivity issues, we have been working on a tutorial-like EEG (pre-)processing pipeline to achieve an automated method based on the semi-automated analysis proposed by Delorme and Makeig.ResultsTwo scripts are presented and explained step-by-step to perform basic, informed ERP and frequency-domain analyses, including data export to statistical programs and visual representations of the data. The open-source software EEGlab in MATLAB is used as the data handling platform, but scripts based on code provided by Mike Cohen (2014) are also included.Comparison with existing methodsThis accompanying tutorial-like article explains and shows how the processing of our automated pipeline affects the data and addresses, especially beginners in EEG-analysis, as other (pre)-processing chains are mostly targeting rather informed users in specialized areas or only parts of a complete procedure. In this context, we compared our pipeline with a selection of existing approaches.ConclusionThe need for standardization and replication is evident, yet it is equally important to control the plausibility of the suggested solution by data exploration. Here, we provide the community with a tool to enhance the understanding and capability of EEG-analysis. We aim to contribute to comprehensive and reliable analyses for neuro-scientific research.

Keywords

• EEG
• electroencephalography
• event-related potentials-ERP
• EEG processing
• EEG preprocessing
• EEG frequency band analysis