ELECTRODES AND IMPEDANCE

An electrode is a metal disk that forms an electrical connection with

the scalp via a conductive gel. The choice of metal is fairly important,
because some metals corrode quickly and loose their conductance. In
addition, the circuit formed by the skin, the electrode gel, and the
electrode can function as a capacitor that attenuates the transmission
of low frequencies.

Until the 1980s most researchers used silver electrodes covered with
a thin coating of silver chloride. These are typically called Ag/AgCl
electrodes. These electrodes have many nice properties, but they can
be somewhat difficult to maintain. In the 1980s, many investigators
started using electrode caps made by Electro-Cap International, which
feature tin electrodes that are very easy to maintain. In theory, tin
electrodes will tend to attenuate low frequencies more than Ag/AgCl
electrodes (Picton, Lins, & Scherg, 1995), but Polich & Lawson found
essentially no difference between these two electrode types when
common ERP paradigms were tested, even for slow potentials such as
the CNV and sustained changes in eye position (Polich & Lawson, 1985).
This may reflect the fact that the filtering caused by electrodes is no
more severe than the typical filter settings of an EEg amplifier (Picton,
Lins, & Scherg, 1995). Moreover, using high impedance amplifiers
reduces the filtering properties of an electrode. On the other hand,
the technology for Ag/AgCl electrodes has improved over the past
decade, and now many investigators have switched back to Ag/AgCl.
Either tin or Ag/AgCl should be adequate for most purposes, unless you
are recording DC potentials.
It is more proper to use the term impedance rather than resistance in
the context of ERP recordings, in which the voltage fluctuates over
time.

It is common practice in ERP research to reduce the impedance of the

skin to below 5Kbefore attaching the electrodes. To reduce the
impedance, it is necessary to remove the outer layer of dead skin cells
that are primarily responsible for the naturally high impedance of the
skin. There are two main classes of methods for accomplishing this, and
the choice of method depends upon the type of electrode being used.
If the electrodes are attached to the head individually using some sort
of adhesive, you can first clean the skin at each site with an alcohol
pad and then rub it with an abrasive paste (it is also possible to do this
in one step with alcohol pads that include an abrasive, which I
recommend). If you are using an electrode cap, it is usually possible to
abrade the electrode sites before applying the electrodes. Instead,
you must insert the abrading implement through the hole in each
electrode to abrade the underlying skin. Most laboratories use a blunt
needle or the wooden end of a cotton tipped swab for this.

There are really two main types of problems that high impedance can
create: 1) decreased common mode rejection, and 2) increased skin
potentials.

First, common mode rejection: The ability of an amplifier to subtract

away environmental noise accurately is called common mode rejection,
and it is usually measured in decibels.
A good EEG amplifier will have a common mode rejection of atleast 70
dB, and preferably over 100 dB. Common mode rejection becomes less
effective when the impedance is higher, and it can become extremely
bad when the impedance is generally high and differs considerably
among the active, reference, and ground electrodes. Thus, low
electrode impedance helps you avoid picking up environmental noise.

Common mode rejection depends not only on the impedance of the

electrodes, but also on the input impedance of the amplifier. An
amplifier with a very high input impedance can tolerate higher
impedance electrodes while maintaining a good level of common mode
rejection. However, high amplifier impedance cannot solve the second
problem associated with high electrode impedance, namely skin
potentials. There is a tonic electrical potential between the surface of
the skin and deep layers of the skin, and this voltage changes whenever
the skins impedance changes. For example, when a subject sweats, the
skins impedance changes and the voltage at the surface changes.
Similarly, if the subject moves, shifting the electrode to a slightly
different position with a slightly different impedance, the voltage will
change. These changes in voltage are called skin potentials, and
because they are often very large, they can be a major source of low
frequency noise in ERP recordings. Picton and Hillyard (1972) showed
that decreasing the impedance of the skin dramatically reduces skin
potentials, and this provides a second compelling reason for decreasing
the impedance before recording ERPs.

The biggest drawback to large arrays of electrodes is the time

required to decrease the impedance at each site. If it takes an average
of one minute to decrease the impedance of each electrode, then a 64
channel electrode cap will require over an hour. A second problem is
that the electrode gel inside a given electrode may leak out and cause
an electrical bridge with nearby electrodes, distorting the scalp
distribution of the electrical potentials. Because the whole point of
recording from a dense electrode array is to measure the scalp
distribution more accurately, this is a significant problem. The third
problem is simply that as the number of electrodes increases, the
probability of the experimenter noticing a bad connection decreases.

The geodesic sensor net Tucker and his colleagues developed provides
a means of recording from many sites while minimizing some of these
problems (Tucker, 1993). The electrodes in this device are basically
just sponge tipped tubes filled with saline, and the electrodes are
connected to special high impedance amplifiers so that no abrasion of
the skin is necessary to obtain a reasonable level of common mode
rejection. Consequently it is possible to attach 128 electrodes in a
matter of minutes. Fast application, high impedance recording systems
of various types are now available from several companies. It might
appear that these systems solve the problem of the long amount of
time required to abrade a large number of sites (and they clearly
reduce the risk of disease transmission through the electrodes).
However, as discussed above, skin potentials are much larger in high
impedance recordings, and this can be a very considerable source of
noise. Moreover these systems do not solve the problem of a greater
likelihood of a bad connection with a larger number of electrodes and
the problem of bridging across electrode sites. These high impedance
systems trade speed of application for degradation in signal quality.

Thus, you might be able to save an hour by using easy to apply

electrode system, but you might need to spend an additional 2 to 3
hours collecting data to offset the resulting reduction in signal to noise
ratio.

A second key factor is that a large number of electrodes (>40) are only
occasionally useful in ERP experiments. It is extremely difficult to
localize the neural generators of an ERP component solely on the basis
of the distribution of voltage over the head, so large number of
electrodes are useful primarily when you will be obtaining some form of
converging evidence (e.g., MEG recordings or fMRI scans). Moreover, in
the few situations in which large number of electrodes are useful, it is
also imperative to obtain extremely clean data, which means that
common mode rejection should be maximized and skin potentials should
be minimized. Thus, there are large costs associated with large
electrode arrays, and one should use them only when the benefits
clearly outweigh the costs.

Amplifying, Filtering and Digitizing the signal

Once the electrodes have picked up the EEG, it must be amplified and
then converted from a continuous, analog voltage into a discrete, digital
form that a computer can store. Fortunately, these processes are
relatively straight forward, although there are a few important issues
to consider, such as selecting an amplifier gain and choosing a
digitization rate.
Analog to digital conversion & high pass filters

A device called Analog-to-digital convertor (ADC) converts EEG voltage

fluctuations into numerical representations. In most EEG digitization
systems, the ADC has a resolution of 12 bits. This means that ADC can
code 212 or 4096 different voltage values.

The fact that EEG is digitized with only 12 bits of resolution does not
mean that your data will ultimately be limited to 12 bits of resolution.
When you average together many trials, the resolution increases
greatly, so 12 bits is sufficient for most cases.

There are two settings on typical EEG amplifier that will affect
whether or not you will exceed the range of ADC (or the range of the
amplifier itself). The first factor is the gain: as you increase the gain,
you increase the chance that the EEG will exceed the ADCs range (you
dont want to set the gain too low, however, because this will cause a
loss of resolution). The second factor is the setting of the high pass
filter. A high pass filter is a device that attenuates low frequencies
and passes high frequencies. High pass filters are important, because
they attenuate the effects of large gradual shifts in voltage due to
skin potentials. Even if you use low impedance recordings, some skin
potentials will occur, and these potentials can cause the EEG to drift
out of the range of the ADC and amplifier, causing a Flat-line signal.
The higher you set the frequency of the high pass filter, the less drift
will occur. Filters always lead to distortion of the ERPs, and the
distortion caused by high pass filter almost always becomes worse as
you increase the cutoff frequency of the filter. However, there are
some cases in which a higher cutoff frequency would be appropriate.
For e.g., When using children or psychiatric/ neurological patients as
subjects, voltage drifts are very common, and eliminating these
artifacts may be worth some distortion of the ERP waveforms.

In some cases, it is also desirable to record the EEG without using the
high pass filter (these are called direct coupled or DC recordings).
Some digitization systems use sixteen bit ADCs to avoid the problems
associated with the lack of a high pass filter. By using a sixteen bit
ADC, it is possible to decrease the gain by a factor of sixteen, which
decreases the likelihood that the EEG will drift out of the range of the
ADC. The reduction in gain is equivalent to losing four ADC bits, but
this is compensated for by the additional four bits of resolution in the
sixteen bit ADC, yielding the equivalent of using twelve bits of
resolution. It is also possible to apply a digital high pass filter to the
data at the end of the experiment, which would give you access to both
the original unfiltered data and filtered data. However, although this
sounds like it would be the best of both worlds, it is difficult in
practice to limit a digital filter to very low frequencies. Consequently,
it is almost always best to use an amplifier with analog filters that can
filter the very low frequencies, reserving DC recordings for the
relatively rare cases in which DC data are important for reaching a
specific scientific conclusion.

Discrete EEG sampling and low pass filters

The EEG is converted into a voltage at a sequence of discrete time

points called samples. The sampling period is the amount of time
between consecutive samples (e.g. 5ms) and the sampling rate is the
number of samples taken per second (e.g. 200Hz). When many channels
are sampled, they are scanned sequentially rather than simultaneously,
but the digitization process is so fast that you can think of the
channels as being sampled at the same time (unless you are examining
extremely high frequency components, such as brainstem evoked
responses).

How do you decide what sampling rate to use? To decide, you need to
use the Nyquist theorem, which states that all of the information in an
analog signal such as the EEG can be captured digitally as long as the
sampling rate is at least twice as great as the highest frequency in the
signal. This theorem also states that you will not only lose information
at lower sampling rates, but you will also induce artifactual low
frequencies in the digitized data (this is called aliasing).

To use the Nyquist theorem, you need to know the frequency content
of the signal that you are recording so that you can set your sampling
rate to be at least twice as great as the highest frequency in the
signal. However, the raw EEG signal may contain noise at arbitrarily
high frequencies, so you cannot digitize the raw EEG without risking
aliasing. EEG amplifiers therefore contain low pass filters that
attenuate high frequencies and pass low frequencies, and your sampling
rate will depend primarily on the cutoff frequency that you select for
your low pass filters. For example, a cutoff frequency of 100Hz does
not completely suppress everything above 100Hz, so you should use a
digitization rate of at least three times the cutoff frequency of the
filter.

The Nyquist theorem gives us a precise means of determining the

sampling rate given the filters cutoff frequency. How do you decide on
the cutoff frequency? The higher the frequency of a low pass filter,
the less distortion it will create. You will want to choose a fairly high
cutoff frequency for your low pass filter. However, you dont want your
filter frequency to be too high, because this will require a very high
digitization rate, leading to huge data files. The best compromise for
most cognitive neuroscience experiments is a low pass cutoff frequency
between 30 and 100Hz and a sampling rate between 100 and 300Hz. If
you are looking at the early sensory responses, youll want to be at the
high end of this range. If you are looking only at lower frequency,
longer latency components, such as P3 and N400, you can set your
cutoff frequency and sampling rate at the low end of this range. The
lower your filter frequency and sampling rate, the less temporal
precision you will have.

Amplifier gain and Calibration

The signal from each electrode is amplified by a separate EEg channel.

The gain (amplification factor) that you will use depends on the input
range of your analog-to-digital convertor. For example, your analog-to-
digital convertor allows an input range of -5V to +5V, you will want to
set the gain of your amplifier so that its output is near -5V or +5V
when it has the most extreme possible input values. That is, you will
want to use the entire range of the analog-to-digital convertor, orelse
you will not be taking advantage of its full resolution. Most systems
work best with a gain somewhere between 1000 and 50000.