1.2: Installing the Software and Downloading the Data
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Minimum hardware and software requirements were listed previously . However, keep in mind that those are only the minimum. You will find the exercises to be much more pleasant if you have at least 8 GB of RAM and at least a 1080p screen. If you don’t have much free disk space, you may need to keep the data from only one or two exercises on your computer at a given time.
Installing Matlab
You will need Matlab version 2017a or later, including the Signal Processing Toolbox. The Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox is recommended (but is not required for any of the exercises in this book). Once you have installed Matlab, you can see what toolboxes are installed by typing ver on the Matlab command line. If you don't have the necessary toolboxes, contact your institution's IT support department for assistance.
Installing EEGLAB and ERPLAB
New versions of Matlab, EEGLAB, and ERPLAB are released at least once per year, and these new versions can lead to changes in how things look (and occasionally changes in the results). To write this book, I mainly used Matlab 2017a or 2020b, EEGLAB 2020.0, and ERPLAB 8.23 on a MacBook Pro running macOS 11. However, we added some important features to ERPLAB as I was writing, so you should use EEGLAB 2022.0 or later and ERPLAB 9.0 or later. You will probably use a different combination, so the screenshots and videos in this book may not exactly match what you see. Newer versions of Matlab, EEGLAB, and ERPLAB will probably work fine, but I would recommend against using older versions.
ERPLAB runs as an EEGLAB plugin, so you must install EEGLAB before installing ERPLAB. You can find the documentation for EEGLAB, including instructions for downloading and installing, at https://sccn.ucsd.edu/wiki/EEGLAB . Make sure to install version 2022.0 or later. Once you’ve installed it, you can launch EEGLAB by typing eeglab in the Matlab command window. Screenshot 1.1 shows what it should look like when EEGLAB has been launched.
A key step in installing EEGLAB is to update the Matlab PATH (whether you are installing EEGLAB for the first time or upgrading to a newer version). If you don’t know how to do this, or you can’t get EEGLAB to launch, you should read the description of how the PATH works later in this chapter. If you are having trouble launching EEGLAB but the PATH isn’t the problem, see the ERPLAB FAQ page , the EEGLAB documentation or the Troubleshooting Guide in Appendix 2 .
Once you have installed EEGLAB, you can download and install ERPLAB (version 9.0 or later). The ERPLAB documentation, including installation instructions, can be found at https://github.com/lucklab/erplab/wiki . There are two ways to install ERPLAB. If you just want the latest major release, you can launch EEGLAB and use its built-in extensions manager by going to File > Manage EEGLAB extensions in the EEGLAB GUI. It will pop up a window with a list of extensions; select ERPLAB and click install/update . If you want an earlier version of ERPLAB (or if you’re a do-it-yourselfer by nature), you can download ERPLAB at https://github.com/lucklab/erplab . Additional ERPLAB installation information can be found at https://github.com/lucklab/erplab/wiki/Installation . Once ERPLAB has been installed and is running within EEGLAB, the EEGLAB GUI should include an ERPLAB menu, as in Screenshot 1.2.
ERPLAB Installation Problems
ERPLAB is installed inside the plugins folder within the EEGLAB folder (e.g., eeglab2020_0 > plugins > ERPLAB8.30). The most common installation problem is that ERPLAB is not located in this place. You should see a file named eegplugin_erplab.m inside that folder (and not inside another folder). ERPLAB has a Frequently Asked Questions page with information about solving such problems.
Another problem that occasionally arises (especially when ERPLAB is being used on a multiuser computer) is that ERPLAB must have write access to the folder that contains the ERPLAB software. This is necessary so that ERPLAB can update a file named memoryerp.erpm , which stores various user settings. To avoid this problem, you should install EEGLAB and ERPLAB inside a folder that you own (e.g., your Documents folder) rather than installing it in a folder that is used by multiple people.
Downloading Data for the Exercises
The data for the exercises are stored in a cloud storage system, and the master folder can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.18115/D50056 . This master folder contains a set of subfolders with the data for each chapter. Unfortunately, the cloud storage system may be blocked in some countries, but I have faith that clever readers will still find a way to access the data. The data have been released with a Creative Commons license that permits them to be copied, used, remixed, and reposted as long as the original source is cited (see the license.txt file in each subfolder). Note that some of the folders are quite large and may take quite a while to download.
Free Data!
Once you’ve finished using this book to learn how to analyze ERP data, you should feel free to download the original data from the ERP CORE . The CORE is a very rich dataset, and you could use it to for novel analyses that might be publishable. Wouldn’t it be nice to publish an ERP paper without having to collect the data yourself?