Automated meta-analysis of the event-related potential (ERP) literature

Abstract

Event-related potentials (ERPs) are a common approach for investigating the neural basis of cognition and disease. There exists a vast and growing literature of ERP-related articles, the scale of which motivates the need for efficient and systematic meta-analytic approaches for characterizing this research. Here we present an automated text-mining approach as a form of meta-analysis to examine the relationships between ERP terms, cognitive domains and clinical disorders. We curated dictionaries of terms, collected articles of interest, and measured co-occurrence probabilities in published articles between ERP components and cognitive and disorder terms. Collectively, this literature dataset allows for creating data-driven profiles for each ERP, examining key associations of each component, and comparing the similarity across components, ultimately allowing for characterizing patterns and associations between topics and components. Additionally, by examining large literature collections, novel analyses can be done, such as examining how ERPs of different latencies relate to different cognitive associations. This openly available dataset and project can be used both as a pedagogical tool, and as a method of inquiry into the previously hidden structure of the existing literature. This project also motivates the need for consistency in naming, and for developing a clear ontology of electrophysiological components.