Some Concepts about ERP signals

Enterprise Resource Planning is usually recognized as ERP for common people, but the "ERP" here means Event related Potential. For brain scientists, it is a common way to investigate the brain. Event-related potential is the measurement of the brain's electrical activity in response to different types of events, such as attention, words, thinking or sounds. By measuring the brain's response to such events we can learn how different types of information are processed.

In an Event related Potential experiment, signals together with the events are recorded. The events (for example, auditory stimulus, vibrative stimulus, human actions) are designed according to the purpose. Thus, ERP experiments provide a possibility to learn how the events are processed in the brain.


Normally, dozens of individual raw ERP experiment signals are averaged together to gain the ERP, this method allow us to cancels out the noise and make the responses clearly. There are three measurable aspects of the ERP waveform, i.e., amplitude, latency, and scalp distribution. Component amplitude provides index of neural activation extent (how the component responds functionally to experimental variables); component latency (the point in time at which the peak occurs) reveals the timing of this activation; and a component’s scalp distribution (the pattern of voltage gradient over the scalp at any point in time) provides information on the overall pattern of activated brain areas.

Note: some contents above comes from Wikipedia


A sample from http://www.city.ac.uk/psychology/research/CNRU/eegintro.html,This is an averaged ERP signal, in which you can see the responses (positive and negative components).Basic research are based on the measurements of this type of components.