After at least 1-2 quarters of experience with eye tracking or ERP data collection, some students want to learn how to process and analyze the data. This is somewhat rare for eye tracking research, where it involves being taught by your direct supervisor how to write Matlab scripts to process the data. It is more common for ERP research, where you can do quite a bit without programming and where we have excellent resources to supplement the training you'll receive from your direct supervisor:

  • ERPLAB Toolbox—this is the software package we developed for ERP analyses (which is used by researchers all over the world)

  • Applied Event-Related Potential Data Analysis—This is a free online book that Steve wrote to teach researchers how to process and analyze EEG/ERP data using ERPLAB Toolbox

  • An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique—This is a more general textbook on ERPs that Steve wrote.

  • The ERP Boot Camp—This is a 10-day NIH-funded summer workshop that we run every year (alternating between San Diego and Davis). It is designed for training people from other universities, but we allow UC-Davis students to attend when it’s in Davis.

RAs who want to learn ERP analysis usually start by going through the first few chapters of the Applied Event-Related Potential Data Analysis book. They then start doing the "preprocessing" steps for an ongoing experiment (sometimes but not always an experiment in which they're doing the recording). Students who are working on individual projects will also typically learn to do the final analyses, such as measuring the amplitudes and latency of ERP components, performing decoding or representational similarity analysis, and statistical analyses.