7.3: Video Demonstration- Performing an Initial Inspection of a Participant’s EEG

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As I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, it’s important to scan through each participant’s EEG to see what kinds of artifacts are in the data. The best way to learn to do this is to go through the data from several participants with an expert who can show you what to look for. I’ve tried to simulate that experience by creating a video where I go through the data from Subject #1 in the ERP CORE MMN experiment.

Every participant is different, but Subject #1 is a good example because the recording contains many of the problems you’ll encounter. In other words, Subject #1 is worse than usual for a basic science experiment in my lab, which is a good thing for seeing examples of problems in EEG data.

When I first started going through Subject #1’s data, the EEG seemed super clean (and therefore not a good example). But as you’ll see in the video, things go downhill pretty rapidly after the first couple minutes of the recording.

You should follow along on your own computer while you watch the video. To do this, quit and relaunch EEGLAB, set Chapter_7 to be Matlab’s current folder, and the load the dataset named 1_MMN_preprocessed.set. Then select EEGLAB > Plot > Channel data (scroll).

Go ahead and watch the video now. You can access it at https://doi.org/10.18115/D5V638. It’s about 10 minutes long, and you’ll definitely need to watch it before you read the rest of this chapter and the chapters on artifact rejection and correction.