Dr. Edith Kaan, associate professor from the University of Florida, gave an introductory lecture on Event-Related Brain Potentials (ERPs) to graduate students and faculty members on 14th, November. Her talk covered several topics, including the nature of ERPs, the advantage and limitations of ERP studies and the recording and analyses of data in ERP experiments. According to Dr. Edith Kaan, ERPs, which are extracted from electroencephalograms (EEGs), help researchers to observe human brain activity of information processing with millisecond accuracy. Furthermore, ERPs studies can reveal the nature of language processes reflected by the qualitatively distinct components. For example, N400 is the index of semantic integration while P600 is the indicator of syntactic processing. However, ERP has its own limitations: it cannot obtain localization information or measure activation that is not time-locked. Finally, after introducing the technical recording and analyzing procedures of ERP data, Dr. Edith Kaan ended her lecture with issues which we should pay attention to when designing ERP experiments.
