Amplitude and phase analysis of the brain Evoked Potential about performing a task related to visual stimulus using Empirical mode decomposition

In this paper, amplitude and phase difference patterns for theta and alpha bands of the Evoked Potential(EP) in relation to perform a task at visual stimulus were analyzed using the Empirical mode decomposition(EMD). The EMD is applied to decompose EP signals with task-related sub-frequency band signals. Intrinsic mode function was implied in Hilbert transform and instantaneous amplitude and phase differences of theta and alpha were derived from Hilbert transformed EP. In a task status, large amplitude for both bands was observed at P2, N2, and P3 points as well as maximum phase difference was observed at N1 and P2. We confirmed that both bands are associated with a task at visual stimulus, and less associated with fixation. The proposed method enhances the time and frequency resolution in comparison with band-pass filter method which observed different phase results according to conditions.ope

Effects of orthographic consistency and homophone density on Chinese spoken word recognition

Studies of alphabetic language have shown that orthographic knowledge influences phonological processing during spoken word recognition. This study utilized the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to differentiate two types of phonology-to-orthography (P-to-O) mapping consistencies in Chinese, namely homophone density and orthographic consistency. The ERP data revealed an orthographic consistency effect in the frontal-centrally distributed N400, and a homophone density effect in central-posteriorly distributed late positive component (LPC). Further source analyses using the standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) demonstrated that the orthographic effect was not only localized in the frontal and temporal-parietal regions for phonological processing, but also in the posterior visual cortex for orthographic processing, while the homophone density effect was found in middle temporal gyrus for lexical-semantic selection, and in the temporal-occipital junction for orthographic processing. These results suggest that orthographic information not only shapes the nature of phonological representations, but may also be activated during on-line spoken word recognition

Evaluation of empirical mode decomposition for event-related potential analysis

Current methods for estimating event-related potentials (ERPs) assume stationarity of the signal. Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is a data-driven decomposition technique that does not assume stationarity. We evaluated an EMD-based method for estimating the ERP. On simulated data, EMD substantially reduced background EEG while retaining the ERP. EMD-denoised single trials also estimated shape, amplitude, and latency of the ERP better than raw single trials. On experimental data, EMD-denoised trials revealed event-related differences between two conditions (condition A and B) more effectively than trials lowpass filtered at 40 Hz. EMD also revealed event-related differences on both condition A and condition B that were clearer and of longer duration than those revealed by low-pass filtering at 40 Hz. Thus, EMD-based denoising is a promising data-driven, nonstationary method for estimating ERPs and should be investigated further