Welcome to the FieldTrip website

FieldTrip is the MATLAB software toolbox for MEG, EEG and iEEG analysis, which is released free of charge as open source software under the GNU general public license. FieldTrip is developed by members and collaborators of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Please cite the reference paper when you have used FieldTrip in your study.

Robert Oostenveld, Pascal Fries, Eric Maris, and Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen. FieldTrip: Open Source Software for Advanced Analysis of MEG, EEG, and Invasive Electrophysiological Data. Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, 2011; 2011:156869.

To get started, head over to the getting started documentation and the tutorials.

Latest release

The latest code developments can be tracked in detail on GitHub.

23 May, 2025

FieldTrip version 20250523 has been released.

It contains multiple small improvements with respect to the latest posted release (20250318):

  • Support for the Helsinki BEM framework to compute forward models.
  • Improved support for the NWB format.
  • Support for the Physionet hea/dat data format.
  • Improved plotting functionality with interactive plotting in subplots.

Thanks to Maximilien Chaumon, and George O’Neill.

See GitHub for the detailed list of updates.

Recent citations

These are recent citations on Pubmed, you can find a more complete list on Google Scholar.

Temporal Dynamics and Representational Consequences of the Control of Processing Conflict between Visual Working Memory and Visual Perception

Teng C, Fulvio JM, Pietrelli M, Jiang J, Postle BR Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2025 Aug 1; 37(8):1328-1348.

Changes in cortical beta power predict motor control flexibility, not vigor

Pierrieau E, Dussard C, Plantey–Veux A, Guerrini C, Lau B, Pillette L, George N, Jeunet-Kelway C Communications Biology, 2025 Jul 11; 8:1041.

Long-term consistency of aperiodic and periodic physiomarkers in subthalamic local field potentials in Parkinson’s disease

Stam MJ, van Wijk BC, Buijink AW, Piña-Fuentes D, de Bie RM, Schuurman R, Beudel M NPJ Parkinson’s Disease, 2025 Jul 10; 11:204.

Chinese Character Features Facilitate Working Memory Updating: Evidence From the EEG

Li H, Ren D, Ouyang Y Brain and Behavior, 2025 Jul 10; 15(7):e70682.

EEG Correlates of Active Removal from Working Memory

Shan J, Postle BR The Journal of Neuroscience, 2025 Jul 9; 45(28):e2414242025.

News and announcements

You can also follow us on Mastodon and BlueSky.

25 June 2025

Robert and Mikkel returned from the African Brain Data Network EEG workshop in Nigeria. It was a nice and intense week with lectures, experimental design, practical experience recording with various EEG systems, and hands-on EEG data analysis sessions. The interaction with the participants was great, and we look forward to see the research that will result from this. All course material, including slides and video recordings of the lectures are shared on the workshop page.

28 May 2025

During the MEG/EEG toolkit last week we noticed that some participants had issues with their MathWorks accounts to download and install the latest MATLAB version. We have now heard that MathWorks has been affected by a ransomware attack. Although our (and hopefully your) local MATLAB installations continue working just fine, it inconvenient as we are busy with preparing for the EEG workshop in Nigeria. For that workshop we want to use MATLAB online, i.e., running it all in the cloud, which would be the first time doing it like this. Let’s hope that MathWorks does not suffer too much and that they can get their systems up and running again.

7 May 2025

Together with the developers of other MEG and EEG analysis software (a.o. MNE-Python, SPM, EEGLAB) we wrote the paper Cycling on the Freeway: The perilous state of open-source neuroscience software in which we argue that the existing ecosystem of neuroscientific open-source software is brittle, and discuss why and how the neuroscience community needs to come together to ensure a healthy software ecosystem to the benefit of all. Please have a look and think about how you can contribute to the long-term continuation of projects like FieldTrip.

25 March 2025

From May 19-23 2025 we will host our annual MEG/EEG Tool-kit course in Nijmegen. During this 5-day toolkit course we will teach you advanced MEG and EEG data analysis skills. Pre-processing, frequency analysis, source reconstruction, analysis methods such as RSA and TRFs, and various statistical methods will be covered. Furthermore, we will give special attention to new opportunities in experimental design and measurements with Optically Pumped Magnetometer (OPM) systems and mobile EEG.

Preregistration is now open, see here.

25 March 2025

We have added three example scripts to the website that demonstrate how to compute EEG forward solutions. They show the similarities and differences between an analytic concentric spheres solution, a BEM solution, and a FEM solution. Furthermore, they show how to deal with geometrical units (millimeter, centimeter, meter) to get correct SI units in the forward and inverse solution.

If you have feedback on these examples, please post an issue on GitHub.

Note that there are also more elaborate tutorials using BEM and FEM for source reconstruction of EEG data.

23 November 2024

The CuttingEEG X conference at the Donders in Nijmegen and online was a great success with lots of positive feedback and interest from our 336 online + 42 onsite participants. All talks and discussions were not only live-streamed, but also recorded and are available on the CuttingEEG YouTube channel.

6 September 2024

Robert is attending and will give a keynote at the 2024 Belt and Road International Conference on Advancing Population Brain Health through Brain-Apparatus Communication in Chengdu, China. Linked to this is the Annual Assembly of the Global Brain Consortium with an online program on Zoom featuring various symposia and a number of keynotes by Aina Puce, Bradley Voytek, Paolo Rossini, Steven Luck, Viktor Jirsa, and Mahnaz Arvaneh. You still might be able to sign up for the online event that takes place this weekend.