Basic Principles of ERP Research, Surprise, and Probability Estimation

Abstract

This section introduces the fundamentals of this work. It starts with a description of the hardware and software which was used to conduct the experiments and further analyses. Next, a method for signal-to-noise ratio estimation of event-related potentials is described, followed by the important concept of circularity in data analyses. Then it is shown how evidence for the coding of probability distributions in the brain can be obtained, using a framework that relates random variables to neural activities. Last, an overview on probability weighting by humans is given, the role of which in probabilistic reasoning is investigated in this work.