1.8: Finding the Right Routine in EEGLAB and ERPLAB

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The fact that ERPLAB works as an EEGLAB plugin has many advantages. However, it occasionally produces some complications. For example, when you are first learning to use EEGLAB and ERPLAB, you will probably find that you occasionally look in the wrong menu. For example, it’s natural to go to the File menu when you want to load an ERP data file or the Plot menu when you want to plot an ERP waveform. However, all ERP-related routines are in the ERPLAB menu (e.g., ERPLAB > Load Existing ERPset and ERPLAB > Plot > Plot ERP Waveforms).

To make things even more complicated, we’ve added several routines for processing EEG data to the ERPLAB menu (e.g., ERPLAB > EEG Channel Operations). We created these routines for several reasons. In some cases, EEGLAB just didn’t have a piece of functionality that we needed. In other cases, we wanted to create improved versions of functionality that was already present in EEGLAB. And in a few cases, the needs of typical ERP analysis required somewhat different versions of existing EEGLAB functions. To keep ERPLAB modular, all of these new or updated EEG functions are accessed from the ERPLAB menu.

To help you find what you’re looking for and use the appropriate routines, Figure 1.1 shows the key menus and indicates which EEGLAB functions should be replaced by ERPLAB functions.

Figure 1.1. Key menus from the EEGLAB GUI. You will use the ERPLAB menu for all ERP-related operations and the other menus for EEG-related operations. For example, you will use the **File** menu to import and open EEG files (“datasets”), but ERP files (“ERPsets”) are loaded from the ERPLAB menu. Similarly, you will use the **Plot** menu to plot EEG data, but **ERPLAB > Plot** to plot ERP data. Also, some EEGLAB functions cannot be used in conjunction with ERPLAB (the **study** functions and the **Extract epochs** function), and other functions will work but are not recommended because analogous functions are available in the ERPLAB menu (e.g., filtering and re-referencing).