Apart from being the place where I get in touch with my dorky issues, you can see MIAO_ERP v.1.0 as a gentle way to bring the Event Related Potential analyses of the fledgling and less fledgling neuroscientist into Matlab, a programming environment with potentially unlimited processing capabilities.
Commercial software for neuro- and psyco- physiological research represented in the past the mainstream resource to get things done in the great majority of academic and private research labs.
On the other hand, several major issues:
- The impossibility for a small bunch of developers to keep up with the current massive developments of biomedical research
- The progressively stronger interaction between neuroscience and diverse fields of pure and applied research
- The labs' necessity to face the dramatical shortage of resources, which the unprivileged academia is unfortunately living
changed in fact things, and the current neuroscientist is often requested to produce the tools on which to base later their own wet hand protocols.
Although the substantial increase of hardware's and software's power of computation over the last decade technically catalyzed this kind of process, a different class of constraints is more cumbersomely surmountable.
Fortunately, human species shows - probably in common with other primates - a strong interest in creating social culture and - especially when a common need rises - human beings tend indeed to gather and to share their intellectual and objectual tools in order to constitute a new reality.
This process, along with other more sophisticated implications of social progress, drove some luminar fringes of academia to channel resources in producing and releasing technological instruments - under the forms of specific software packages, or toolboxes - whose value is inestimable for the scientific community in general, and for the young, eager and brilliant - but lonely and poor - scientist, in particular.
When it comes to psychophysiology, FIELDTRIP, EEGLAB, and their respective extensions and plugins (e.g., ERPLAB, ADJUST, etc..), provide a wide scenario of solutions.
In dealing with all these tools, it is very important that you bear in mind that there is not a better solution: each package is developed in a specific background and each one with a slightly different approach. In order not to get lost, you need to be clever, picking up the pieces that better suit your needs.
Since MATLAB is the standard environment for all of them, and since a lot of work is done to allow for an easy and reliable conversion of your data from one format to another, you need to be flexible. There is indeed no reason to monodirectionally and shortsightedly choose to take into consideration just one path, ignoring the others.
MIAO_ERP v.1.0 represents the way a [non-software] developer (i.e., me) chose to get started with the state-of-the-art signal processing scenario.
The adventure stems from having the raw BDF data from the subjects of my EEG visual search and cross-modal integration experiments imported into EEGLAB, and goes on with a reliable consideration of the basic methodologies for signal cleaning and erp handling in ERPLAB.
It is now about to go on with more powerful and complex time and frequency wise methodologies of data analysis. Fieldtrip is likely to be the ground where the next updates on this repo will develop.
If you are one of those fledgling and less fledgling neuroscientists who might benefit from the contents of this repo, and you think MIAO ERP v.1.0 may help you in your research, feel free to take your lurking time here, or to actively pull this archive and/or to push whatever commit you would like to.
In doing so, you may want to keep in your mind that I am not a specialist of signal processing. I am just - slightly lamely - finding my way into a good and reasoned knowledge of the current advanced techniques of signal analysis, in order to validly and reliably apply them to what I do better.
It follows that this is not the most appropriate place to get enlightening insights concerning specific complex issues related to signal processing. You should subscribe to EEGLAB and FIELDTRIP respective listservs to get precious hints from very passionate and dedicated experts of the technical side of the game.
Code belonging to the aforementioned packages is protected by the respective licenses, and it is free for distribution for non-commercial purposes. Matlab is a commercial software and language, it is your responsibility to make yourself sure you are running it legally, before proceeding with MIAO_ERP v.1.0. The rest of the code is completely free and unprotected. That means that you can do whatsoever you might find it useful with it.
I hope this may inspire and enhance your research.
Mahesh