The dramatic increase in interest in functional magnetic resonance imaging in recent years has been accompanied by a wealth of literature on the scientific foundations of the procedure and the highly complex methodological issues that must be considered during experimental design and data analysis. To some extent, progress in this exciting area has eclipsed significant developments in other areas of neuroimaging, particularly the “neuromagnetic” approaches that study time-locked brain electrical potentials or magnetic field changes produced in the course of processing perceptual, cognitive, and motor events. However, there has been increasing recognition that the study of event-related electrical potentials and neuromagnetic responses remains a critical complement to “hemodynamic” approaches because of their exquisite temporal resolution and because they provide a more direct index of neural activity related to stimulus events than procedures dependent on the coupling of brain activity with cerebral blood flow. In this context, Event Related Poten\.tials: A Methods Handbook, edited by Todd C. Handy, represents an important and long overdue handbook. It provides practical and concise information on ERP methods that is comparable to literature available for fMRI techniques.

The 15 chapters of this volume present essential information on the design, analysis and interpretation of experiments using event related potentials (ERPs). The first section, comprised of four chapters, lays the foundations of ERP methodology. The introductory chapter by Otten and Rugg nicely addresses basic concepts and assumptions underlying the interpretation of ERPs. Steven Luck then provides useful guidelines for designing ERP experiments and Handy addresses important methodological issues regarding ERP quantification. The section closes with a nicely executed tutorial by Dien and Santuzzi on the application of multivariate statistical methods to high density ERP datasets.

The second section is comprised of seven chapters that focus on data analysis. Edgar, Stewart and Miller's detailed discussion on the use of digital filtering techniques is complemented by Talsma and Woldorff's excellent review of methods for estimating and removing artifacts. Slotnick addresses the difficulties of source localization of ERP generators and Srinivasan balances this with a meticulous theoretical and practical review of quantitative measures of the spatial information that can be derived from EEG data. The treatment of surface Laplacian methods is supplemented with some useful practical examples. Dien and Frishkoff then provide a very nice discussion of the application of principal components analysis to ERP data and Spencer provides a welcome review of methods for analyzing single trial ERPs. Herrmann, Grigutsch and Busch close this section on advanced analytic techniques with a discussion of wavelet analysis.

The third and final section consists of 4 chapters focusing on the use of the ERPs in specific populations and in special settings. DeBoer, Scott and Nelson discuss the distinctive issues associated with studying ERPs in developmental populations, while Swick provides an overview of the extant literature on ERPs in neuropsychological populations such as patients with amnesia, traumatic brain injury, and aphasia. Soltani, Edwards, Knight and Berger describe the highly specialized methods of intracranial recording, deftly addressing the various methodological concerns inherent in intraoperatve procedures including the effects of the anesthetic agents. Finally, Hopfinger, Khoe and Song provide a highly topical discussion on multi-modal imaging where ERP data is integrated with information obtained from PET, MRI, and fMRI.

The goal of this volume was to “meet the need for practical and concise information on the methods of ERPs in a manner intelligible to novice ERP investigators, but sufficiently rigorous so as to be informative to the most seasoned of electrophysiology experts.” These lofty goals have, for the most part, been admirably achieved. The wide coverage of topics and methods encompasses the most important technical details of the latest experimental techniques. These are discussed in a nicely balanced manner, addressing the strengths and pitfalls of each of these approaches. As might be expected, there are some shortcomings associated with the broad scope insofar as the depth of treatment is sometimes compromised. For example, independent components analysis is briefly discussed in chapters by Luck, Talsma and Woldorff, and DeBoer et al., but the overall coverage falls short, in my opinion, of current views of the merits of the technique to ERP analysis. This may be, in part, a function of the inevitable delay from book inception to the bookshelf. In addition, the content focuses overwhelmingly on ERP methods in cross-sectional studies and some treatment of special considerations inherent in longitudinal designs (e.g., clinical trials) would have been invaluable. Finally, some coverage of steady-state techniques might be considered for future editions.

Overall, this volume represents an important contribution to the field. It provides an essential complement to well-thumbed but now dated standards such as David Regan's Evoked Potentials in Psychology, Sensory Physiology and Clinical Medicine, Chiappa's Evoked Potentials in Clinical Medicine, or more recent theoretically-oriented volumes such as Electrophysiology of Mind by Rugg and Coles. It succeeds in presenting sophisticated coverage of cutting-edge experimental techniques to broaden the horizons of seasoned researchers yet is sufficiently accessible and provides a level of tutorial content to satisfy newcomers to cognitive neuroscience and ERP methods. It would make an excellent reference text for a graduate level course on human cognitive neurophysiology and serve equally well as an essential lab resource book. It is precisely the type of book that the field needed to redress some of the imbalance that emerged with the prodigious advancement of hemodynamically based methods of functional neuroimaging.