A Tutorial Review of Electrical Neuroimaging From Group-Average to Single-Trial Event-Related Potentials

Abstract

This tutorial review details some of the recent advances in signal analyses applied to event-related potential (ERP) data. These “electrical neuroimaging” analyses provide reference-independent measurements of response strength and response topography that circumvent statistical and interpretational caveats of canonical ERP analysis methods while also taking advantage of the greater information provided by high-density electrode montages. Electrical neuroimaging can be applied across scales ranging from group-averaged ERPs to single-subject and single-trial datasets. We illustrate these methods with a tutorial dataset and place particular emphasis on their suitability for studies of clinical and/or developmental populations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Cartool software (http://brainmapping.unige.ch/Cartool.htm) has been programmed by Denis Brunet, from the Functional Brain Mapping Laboratory, Geneva, Switzerland, and is supported by the Electroencephalography Brain Mapping Core of the Center for Biomedical Imaging (http://www.cibm.ch) of Geneva and Lausanne.

Some general notations: n is the number of electrodes in the montage, including the reference u_i is the measured potential of the i^th electrode, for a given condition U, at a given time point t (computed against the common average reference) v_i is the measured potential of the i^th electrode, either from another condition V, or from the same condition U but at a different time point t₀

Q is the total number of Gaussians in a given distribution.

Notes

Financial support was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grants K-33K1_122518/1 to MDL, 3100A0_118419 and 310030B 133136 to MMM). MMM and CMM also receive support from the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) project “SYNAPSY — The Synaptic Bases of Mental Disease” (project no. 51AU40_125759).