When I was a new assistant professor, journal editors kept sending me ERP papers to review that were just awful. I think the editors didn’t want to waste the time of more established researchers with these terrible manuscripts. The papers were generally written by researchers who were relatively new to the technique and had not “grown up” in an ERP lab. Because they had not received much ERP training, they made all kinds of errors in the design, the analysis, and the interpretation of the experiments.
That experience made me realize how fortunate I had been to be trained in Steve Hillyard’s lab, which traced its roots to the very first published ERP experiment (Davis, 1939). I decided to write a book that distilled everything I had learned in the Hillyard lab so that everyone could benefit from this knowledge (Luck, 2005). I also started running in-person training workshops called ERP Boot Camps along with Emily Kappenman. Emily and I also put together an edited volume on ERP components (Luck & Kappenman, 2012). To make it easier for researchers to analyze their data using the methods we were promoting, I worked with Javier Lopez-Calderon to release ERPLAB Toolbox, a free ERP data processing package (Lopez-Calderon & Luck, 2014). And then I wrote a second edition of my ERP book (Luck, 2014), taking advantage of everything I had learned from the ERP Boot Camp about how to explain ERP methodology.
Although these efforts have reached thousands of researchers, I always felt that something was missing. The books and workshops provided a mix of theory and practical advice, but they were necessarily quite broad given the wide range of researchers who use ERPs. It can be very difficult to take these broad ideas and apply them to the analysis of actual experiments. So, what was missing from our books and our workshops was the opportunity to solve all the problems that arise when you’re analyzing real data. We tried having data analysis tutorials in a few of the early ERP Boot Camps, but we found that we spent 98% of our time teaching the participants how to run the software. Also, we ended up teaching them how to analyze data from just a single experiment, which was often quite different from their own research interests.
The present book is designed to fill this gap. It includes tons of example data sets and exercises, all of which run on the free ERPLAB Toolbox package. These examples use data from the ERP CORE (Kappenman et al., 2021), which has data from six classic ERP paradigms. As a result, the examples in this book cover a broad range of paradigms and components with real data.
I’ve published this book on the free LibreTexts platform so that anyone in the world can learn about ERP data analysis for free. I was extremely fortunate to have great opportunities to learn about ERPs as a student, and I’m trying to “pay it forward” with this book. If you teach the ERP technique to other people (either in courses or in your lab), you should feel free to remix and reuse the book in any way that you find helpful.
Funding
Preparation of this book was made possible by grant R01MH087450 from the National Institute of Mental Health.
References
Davis, P. A. (1939). Effects of acoustic stimuli on the waking human brain. Journal of Neurophysiology, 2, 494–499.
Kappenman, E. S., Farrens, J. L., Zhang, W., Stewart, A. X., & Luck, S. J. (2021). ERP CORE: An Open Resource for Human Event-Related Potential Research. NeuroImage, 225, 117465. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117465
Lopez-Calderon, J., & Luck, S. J. (2014). ERPLAB: An open-source toolbox for the analysis of event-related potentials. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 213. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00213
Luck, S. J. (2005). An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique. MIT Press.
Luck, S. J. (2014). An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique, Second Edition. MIT Press.
Luck, S. J., & Kappenman, E. S. (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Event-Related Potential Components. Oxford University Press.
