Assessment of the improvement of signal recorded in infant EEG by using eye tracking algorithms

Event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by visual stimuli consist in showing the same stimuli to the subject dozens of times while recording the electrical brain activity and averaging afterwards the EEG signal of the valid trials to get rid of the general brain activity and keep the response generated by the stimuli. ERPs are a common methodology used among cognitive developmental scientists to investigate how infants develop because responses to external events can be observed in ERP without specific behavioral requirements from the infants. However, applying this technique to infants has some disadvantages that are not found in adult participants. These are mainly the limited attention span and the difficulty of getting enough free-artifact trials due to movement artifacts and lack of attention to the stimuli. These limitations are the main reason for the current attrition rates in infant ERP studies, which are expected of between 50%-75% [DeBoer et al., 2007; Stets et al., 2012].