BrainVision Workshop May 21-23, 2014

Part I - ERP
1. Whats ERP?
An event-related potential (ERP) is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific
sensory, cognitive, or motor event. More formally, it is any stereotyped electrophysiological response to
a stimulus. The study of the brain in this way provides a noninvasive means of evaluating brain
functioning in patients with cognitive diseases.

Fig. 1. ERP brain wave and tomography
The waveform showed in Fig.1 contains several ERP components, including the N100 and P300. Note
that the ERP is plotted with negative voltages upward, a common, but not universal, practice in ERP
research. It is recommended that the waveform and the tomography should be shown together.
The N100 or N1 is a large, negative-going evoked potential measured by electroencephalography, which
peaks in adults between 80 and 120 milliseconds after the onset of a stimulus, and distributed mostly
over the frontal-central region of the scalp. It is elicited by any unpredictable stimulus in the absence of
task demands. It is often referred to with the following P200 evoked potential as the "N100-P200" or
"N1-P2" complex. While most research focuses on auditory stimuli, the N100 also occurs for visual (see
visual N1, including an illustration), olfactory, heat, pain, balance, respiration blocking, and
somatosensory stimuli.
2. How to calculate ERP?
The EEG reflects thousands of simultaneously ongoing brain processes. This means that the brain
response to a single stimulus or event of interest is not usually visible in the EEG recording of a single
trial. To see the brain's response to a stimulus, the experimenter must conduct many trials (100 or more)
and average the results together, causing random brain activity to be averaged out and the relevant
waveform to remain, called the ERP.

Fig. 2. ERP calculation
Shown in Fig. 2, averaging increases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the recorded ERPs, which is based
on two assumptions:
1). the signal of interest is made of a sequence of event-locked ERPs with invariable latency and shape.
2). the noise can be approximated by a zero-mean Gaussian random process.
Based on the assumptions, more trials make the variance smaller.
3. Filters used in ERP
"An ideal electrical filter should not only completely reject the unwanted frequencies but should also
have uniform sensitivity for the wanted frequencies" Butterworth.

Fig. 3. several types of filter