Exploratory EEG data analysis for psychophysiological experiments

A method for the exploratory analysis of electroencephalographic (EEG) data for neurophysiological experiments is presented. It is based on a time-frequency decomposition of the EEG time series, which is measured by several electrodes in the scalp surface, and includes the computation of a statistic that measures the deviations of the log-power with respect to the pre-stimulus average; the computation of a significance index for these deviations; a new type of display (the time-frequency-topography plot) for the visualization of these indices, and the segmentation of the time-frequency plane into regions with uniform activation patterns. As a particular example, an experiment to study EEG changes during figure and word categorization is analyzed in detail. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.