ERPLAB Classic User's Manual

ERPLAB Toolbox is an open-source Matlab package for analyzing event-related potentials (ERPs). The original version of ERPLAB, now called ERPLAB Classic, is a plugin that operates within the EEGLAB package. ERPLAB Studio is a standalone application that implements the same underlying ERPLAB and EEGLAB code from a more user-friendly GUI.

This manual is for ERPLAB Classic; there is a separate manual for ERPLAB Studio and a detailed wiki for EEGLAB. Additional ERPLAB documentation is available on our GitHub Wiki page.

If you are new to ERPLAB, please go through the ERPLAB Studio Tutorial or ERPLAB Classic Tutorial before attempting to use our software. This will require some initial investment of time, but it will end up saving you time and frustration in the long run.

When you use ERPLAB Classic, EEGLAB is used to read in EEG data files and perform various operations on the EEG, and ERPLAB contains a set of additional functions that are accessed from the ERPLAB plugin within EEGLAB These functions include additional EEG processing manipulations (e.g., new functions for marking trials with artifacts) along with functions that provide powerful methods for sorting EEG epochs and averaging them together. Once a set of averages has been created, they are saved in binary files and can be exported into text files (allowing them to be imported into other ERP analysis systems). ERPLAB also contains routines that operate on the averaged ERP waveforms (e.g., making difference waves, plotting, filtering, measurement, etc.).

This manual provides a detailed overview of each ERPLAB Classic function, along with data types and other useful background information. For an quick overview of how ERPLAB is used for typical ERP processing, see the ERPLAB Classic Tutorial. For a detailed overview of both ERPLAB and the principles underlying ERP processing, see Steve Luck's free online book, Applied ERP Data Analysis

If you run into trouble, check out our Frequently Asked Questions page. All documentation is available on our GitHub Wiki page.

If you have questions about using the software or comments of general interest, please post them to the ERPLAB email list. To report bugs, please send an email to [email protected] (including as much detail as possible so that we can reproduce the problem).

Table of Contents

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• Installation Information
• Release Notes For This Version
• Learning To Use ERPLAB Toolbox
• Basic ERPLAB Processing Steps
• Important Background Concepts and Data Structures
• Using EEGLAB
• Preprocessing Continuous EEG
• The EventList Structure
• Creating an EventList
• Exporting, Editing, and Importing EventLists
• Boundary Events and Disabled Events
• Assigning Events to Bins with BINLISTER
• Epoching Bins
• Artifact Detection in Epoched Data
• Artifact Rejection in Continuous Data
• Behavioral Analyses
• Computing Averaged ERPs
• Getting Information About an ERP from the Matlab Command line
• ERP Bin Operations
• EEG and ERP Channel Operations
• Filtering
• Plotting ERP Waveforms
• Topographic Mapping
• Saving, Loading, Duplicating, Renaming, Clearing, and Exporting Erpsets
• Appending Erpsets
• Averaging Across Erpsets (Creating Grand Averages)
• ERP Measurement Tool
• Timing Details
• Current Source Density (CSD) Tool
• Data Quality Metrics
• Selecting Optimal Filters with ERPLAB Toolbox
• Create an Artificial ERP Waveform

Important note: In some cases, errors will occur leading to a message that instructs you to report the error to the EEGLAB developers. If this happens, please report the error to us at [email protected] and not to the EEGLAB developers.