FieldTrip workshop in Bern, Switzerland

  • By whom: Maria Carla Piastra, Marios Antonakakis, Simon Homölle
  • When: 29 August 2017
  • Where: Pre-conference training courses at the BACI2017 conference in Bern http://www.baci-conference.com
  • Local organization: Thomas König.

How should you prepare for the workshop?

In this workshop we will have a steep learning curve. We will move from basic preprocessing to source-level analysis. Given the limited amount of time, it is important that you come well prepared.

If you are not familiar with MATLAB or are not certain about your MATLAB skills, please go through the “MATLAB for psychologists” tutorial on http://www.antoniahamilton.com/matlab.html

Please read the FieldTrip reference paper to understand the toolbox design.

In the first workshop hands-on session we will start with preprocessing EEG data, but will not spend too much time on understanding how MATLAB works and how FieldTrip organizes the data. Therefore if you have never done any FieldTrip analysis in MATLAB before, you should read this introduction tutorial. We will start at 9:00 sharp and will finish around 17:30.

Tuesday

09:00-09:30 Welcome
09:30-10:30 Lecture Preprocessing
10:30-10:45 Coffee break
10:45-11:30 Hands on - Preprocessing
11:30-12:30 Lecture - Forward problem
12:30-14:00 Lunch break
14:00-15:00 Hands on - Forward problem
15:00-15:45 Lecture - Inverse problem
15:45-16:00 Coffee break
16:00-17:00 Hands on - Inverse problem
17:00-17:30 Wrap-up-the-day: special topics, general questions and answers

To get going, you need to start MATLAB. Then, you need to issue the following command

restoredefaultpath
cd <path_to_fieldtrip>
addpath(pwd)
ft_defaults

Please do NOT use the graphical path management tool from MATLAB. In this hands-on session we’ll manage the path from the command line, but in general you are much better off using the startup.m file than the path GUI.

Please do NOT add FieldTrip with all subdirectories, subdirectories will be added automatically when needed, and only when needed.

The restoredefaultpath command clears your path, keeping only the official MATLAB toolboxes. The addpath(pwd) statement adds the present working directory, i.e. the directory containing the fieldtrip main functions. The ft_defaults command ensures that all required subdirectories are added to the path.

If you get the error “can’t find the command ft_defaults” you should check the present working directory.

After installing FieldTrip to your path, you need to change into the hands-on specific directory, containing the data that is necessary to run the specific hands-on session. These folders are located in C:\FieldTrip_workshop\baci2017\data.