ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the basic principles behind the electrophysiological method known as electroencephalography (EEG). It also considers some concrete examples of how EEG is used in contemporary cognitive neuroscience and contrast it with other methods used in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. The physiological basis of the EEG signal originates in the postsynaptic dendritic currents rather than the axonal currents associated with the action potential. The most common use of EEG in cognitive neuroscience is the method known as Event-related potential or event-related potentials. The EEG waveform reflects neural activity from all parts of the brain. The most common way of attempting to solve the inverse problem involves a procedure called dipole modeling. This requires assumptions to be made about how many regions of the brain are critical for generating the observed pattern of scalp potentials. Magnetoencephalography can be regarded as a parallel method to EEG that is similar in many regards.
