EPOS: EEG Processing Open-source Standardization

Since the replication crisis, standardization has assumed even greater importance in psychological science and neuroscience. Many widely used methods are therefore being reconsidered and the degrees of freedom these methods provide to researchers are discussed as a potential source of inconsistencies across studies. With the aim of addressing these subjectivity problems, we have been working for some time on standardizing EEG analysis in order to achieve an automated and standardized processing pipeline based on the suggested semi-automated analysis proposed by Delorme and Makeig. In this work, two scripts are now presented and explained, each containing 9 steps to perform a basic, informed ERP and frequency-domain analyses, including data export to statistical programs and visual representations of the results for validation of the results. The open-source software EEGlab in MATLAB is used as the data handling platform, but also included are scripts based on the code provided by Mike Cohen (2014). We hope that this (pre-) processing chain may offer a standardized way of analyzing data, and one that clearly explains and openly shows how the processing impacts the data, especially for beginners and newcomers in EEG-analysis. The need for standardization and replication is clearly important, yet it is equally important to look carefully into the details rather than blindly following a set of prescribed procedures. Here, we provide this tool to the community to enhance the understanding and capability of EEG-analysis, as part of one small and very basic step to enhancing rich, comprehensive and reliable methods for neuro-scientific research.