Clinical Neurophysiology 110 (1999) 787±798

Designing optimal spatial ®lters for single-trial EEG classi®cation in a

movement task
Johannes MuÈller-Gerking a,*, Gert Pfurtscheller b,1, Henrik Flyvbjerg c, d
a
HLRZ, Forschungszentrum JuÈlich, D-52425 JuÈlich, Germany
b
Department of Medical Informatics, Graz University of Technology, Brockmanngasse 41, A-8010 Graz, Austria
c
Optics and Fluid Dynamics Department, Risù Nat'l Lab, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark
d
The Niels Bohr Institute. Blegdamsvej 17, DK-2100 Copenhagen é, Denmark
Accepted 8 September 1998

Abstract
We devised spatial ®lters for multi-channel EEG that lead to signals which discriminate optimally between two conditions. We demon-
strate the effectiveness of this method by classifying single-trial EEGs, recorded during preparation for movements of the left or right index
®nger or the right foot. The classi®cation rates for 3 subjects were 94, 90 and 84%, respectively. The ®lters are estimated from a set of multi-
channel EEG data by the method of Common Spatial Patterns, and re¯ect the selective activation of cortical areas. By construction, we obtain
an automatic weighting of electrodes according to their importance for the classi®cation task. Computationally, this method is parallel by
nature, and demands only the evaluation of scalar products. Therefore, it is well suited for on-line data processing. The recognition rates
obtained with this relatively simple method are as good as, or higher than those obtained previously with other methods. The high recognition
rates and the method's procedural and computational simplicity make it a particularly promising method for an EEG-based brain±computer
interface. q 1999 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: EEG classi®cation; Mu rhythm; Voluntary movement; Sensorimotor cortex; Human; Event-related desynchronization

1. Introduction states are event-related potentials (EP) (Farwell and

The study of surface EEG as a possible new communica-
tion channel for severely disabled persons has a long history
(Nirenberg et al., 1971), and has received increased atten-
tion recently (e.g. Farwell and Donchin, 1988; Sutter and
Tran, 1990; Wolpaw and McFarland, 1994; Kalcher et al.,
1996; Pfurtscheller et al., 1997). The EEG allows the obser-
vation of gross electrical ®elds of the brain, and re¯ects
changes in neural mass activity associated with various
mental processes. Since some mental processes result in
distinguishable EEGs, a person that can produce such
mental processes at will, has the potential to use them for
communication. The feasibility of this communication
depends on the extent to which the EEGs associated with
these mental processes can be reliably recognized automa-
tically. The electro-physiological phenomena investigated
most in the quest for an automatic discrimination of mental
* Corresponding author. Tel.: 1 49-2461-612-318; fax: 1 49-2461-
612-430.
E-mail address: j.mueller-gerking@fz-juelich.de (J. MuÈller-Gerking)
1
Supported in part by the Austrian `Fonds zur FoÈrderung der
wissenschaftlichen Forschung', project P11208MED.
Donchin, 1988; Sutter and Tran, 1990), and localized
changes in spectral power of spontaneous EEG related to
sensorimotor processes (see e.g. Wolpaw and McFarland,
1994; Kalcher et al., 1996; Pfurtscheller et al., 1997).
It is well known that planning and execution of move-
ment leads to a short-lasting and circumscribed attenuation
known as event-related desynchronization (ERD,
Pfurtscheller and Aranibar, 1979) of rhythmic EEG compo-
nents in the alpha and beta band (Gastaut, 1952; Chatrian et
al., 1959; Kuhlman, 1978; Pfurtscheller et al., 1996). In the
case of ®nger or hand movement, the desynchronization
starts in the contralateral sensorimotor cortex during the
planning phase and stays asymmetrical over both hemi-
spheres until movement onset. Recordings from subdural
electrodes show similar behavior, but the responses are
more localized and the changes in spectral power are
much enhanced (Toro et al., 1994).
The ERD of mu and central beta rhythms can be seen as a
correlate of exited or activated sensorimotor areas, where
thalamo-cortical information exchange and processing takes
place (Steriade and Llinas, 1988). An interesting observa-
tion is that at the same moment in time, different cortical

1388-2457/99/$ - see front matter q 1999 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. CLINPH 98577
PII: S 1388-245 7(98)00038-8
788 J. MuÈller-Gerking et al. / Clinical Neurophysiology 110 (1999) 787±798
areas can display focal attenuated (ERD) and focal
enhanced mu and beta components. The latter phenomenon
is known as event-related synchronization (ERS) and may
be seen as a correlate of active inhibited or deactivated
cortical areas (Pfurtscheller, 1992). It may be hypothesized
that the structure controlling the patterns of simultaneous
cortical desynchronization and synchronization, and hence,
the gating of the thalamo-cortical information transfer, is the
reticular thalamic nucleus (Yingling and Skinner, 1977). In
the case of hand movement, ERD can be found over the
hand area and ERS over the foot area. Foot or toe movement
can result in a foot area ERD and simultaneously in a hand
area ERS (Pfurtscheller et al., 1996). The observation of
simultaneously attenuated and enhanced EEG rhythms can
be used to classify brain states related to the planning or
even imagination of different types of limb movements.
Recently, imagined movements of the right and left hand
were classi®ed correctly in 80% of single trials in 3 trained
subjects (Pfurtscheller et al., 1997).
Such imagination prompted changes of sensorimotor
rhythms have been suggested as a possible means to re-
establish communication in patients with severe motor
disturbances (Wolpaw et al., 1991; Wolpaw and McFarland,
1994). In order to be useful in practical applications, such a
system must achieve close to 100% classi®cation accuracy.
In many of these experiments, the EEG is recorded on a
multitude of channels placed in a dense grid covering large
parts of the brain. Given that the sensorimotor rhythms
originate from very localized areas in the cortex, we expect
that not all signals recorded from different sites contribute
the same amount of information to the classi®cation, and
some may only contribute noise. The central electrodes
overlying primary sensorimotor areas will be most impor-
tant for discrimination. Since the skull and the scalp cause a
spatial smearing of the cortical signals, electrodes close to
sensorimotor areas will also contain relevant information.
However, with increasing distance from sensorimotor areas,
the recorded signal will be increasingly contaminated by
cortical activity unrelated to the movement to be discrimi-
nated. Two consequences arise from this situation: ®rst, the
signals from different electrodes have to be weighted in
some way, in order to re¯ect their relevance for the classi-
®cation task. Second, the correlations between signals from
neighboring electrodes can be used to suppress the noise in
individual channels.
The weighting problem has been attacked mostly with ad
hoc procedures, i.e. the features derived from an electrode
are weighted or selected not by a criterion determined from
the data directly, but a posteriori by their importance for the
classi®er. This is done, for example, by the modi®cation to
the Learning Vector Quantization scheme (LVQ) intro-
duced by Pregenzer et al. (1994), in order to render it
distinction sensitive (DSLVQ). Another example is Peters
et al. (1997), who trained neural networks on the AR coef®-
cients of each individual channel. Those networks that
perform best on a validation set of trials become members
of a committee, the size of which is chosen for optimal
performance of the committee. Classi®cation is decided
by a `vote' among the committee members. This classi®er
works well only when some channels have a high signal-to-
noise ratio. The channels left out of the committee are those
that bring more noise than signal to the decision-making. In
a situation of low signal-to-noise ratios in all channels, this
method will fail, even if a high signal-to-noise ratio can be
achieved by spatial ®ltering.
The possibility to achieve better signal-to-noise ratios by
making use of the inherent correlation between neighboring
channels has so far not been exploited. On the contrary, one
of the commonly extracted features, spectral properties from
the individual time-series, no longer contain this a priori
information.
The method we advocate here is based on a decomposi-
tion of the raw signals into spatial patterns that are extracted
from the data of two populations of EEGs in a manner that
maximizes their differences. These spatial patterns provide
a weighting of the electrodes, which is derived directly from
the data. We will show how these patterns re¯ect the under-
lying physiological processes.
The method used for the extraction of the patterns from
the data is based on the method of Common Spatial Patterns
(CSP) which was introduced in the ®eld of EEG analysis by
Koles et al. (1990). They used the method to classify normal
versus abnormal EEGs (Koles et al., 1994), to both extract
abnormal components from EEGs (Koles, 1991), and to
localize sources (Koles et al., 1995; Soong and Koles,
1995).
In brief, this method takes as input two sets of spatial
patterns representing two classes into which other sets of
spatial patterns are later to be classi®ed. Below, an element
in such a set, a spatial pattern will be the amplitudes of an N-
channel EEG at a given instant in time. A set of patterns may
consist of the T spatial patterns that make up the EEG of a
single trial, recorded at T consecutive points in time. Or a set
may consist of the union of recordings from several trials.
The latter is the case for the sets used to calibrate the
method, that is, the sets of spatial patterns from which the
method extracts the spatial features later used for classi®ca-
tion. The former is the case when the EEG of a single trial is
to be classi®ed. In either case, we note that time is no more
than an index distinguishing different patterns recorded at
different times. Due to the temporal high-pass ®ltering, the
signals have zero mean. Therefore, average patterns are
unsuited to distinguish the classes and covariances have to
be used instead.
As output, calibration of the method gives an ordered list
of characteristic spatial patterns. These characteristic
patterns de®ne directions in pattern space that are optimally
suited for distinguishing between the two classes. A time-
series of patterns that belongs to either one or the other
class, will, after an appropriate transformation, scatter maxi-
mally along the ®rst direction and minimally along the last,
if it belongs to the ®rst class, and vice versa if it belongs to
 J. MuÈller-Gerking et al. / Clinical Neurophysiology 110 (1999) 787±798
Table 1
The number of artifact-free trials analyzed below, for each of 3 subjects,
A4, B6, and B8 and 3 movements, L, R, F, denoting respectively left index
®nger, right index ®nger, and right foot
Subject L R F Total
A4 73 73 77 223
B6 55 54 64 173
B8 37 48 39 124
the other class. The second and the second-to-last directions
in the list are the second best directions for this discrimina-
tion, and so on for the other directions in the list. Given an
EEG, one then treats it as a set of T spatial patterns, projects
these onto the most discriminatory characteristic patterns,
and calculates the variance of the T values resulting from
each projection. These variances are the features on which
classi®cation of the EEG is based, using a simple linear
classi®er. Typically only a few directions in pattern space,
i.e. a few characteristic patterns, are suf®cient for the discri-
mination task, so these patterns may be thought of as spatial
®lters that select the most relevant spatial aspects for the
discrimination task. We thus obtain a drastic reduction in
the dimensionality of the problem while making use of the
information contained in all channels.
The goal of the work presented in this paper was to
pioneer the application of optimal spatial ®lters to the task
of single trial EEG classi®cation. The data used were
recorded during the planning phase of 3 different types of
movement; left and right index ®nger movement and right
foot movement. Some of the results presented here were
reported in preliminary form in MuÈller-Gerking et al.,
(1997).
2. Methods and materials
2.1. Experiment and data
The experimental protocol followed a classical memor-
ized delay task. Three subjects were asked to perform one of
4 movements (pressing a micro-switch with the left or right
index ®nger, ¯exing the toes of the right foot, or moving the
tongue to the upper gum) after a series of stimuli. Each trial
started with a short warning tone (warning stimulus, WS).
One second after a WS, a visual cue (CUE) appeared on a
computer screen in front of the subject, indicating which
movement was to be done. The movements asked for
were chosen at random among the 4 movements studied.
The actual movement was to be performed only after a
third, acoustic stimulus (reaction stimulus, RS) which
occurred 2 s after the cue. Reaction times between RS and
the actual movement were broadly distributed between 0.75
and 1.75 s. A total of 150 trials of each class of movement
were recorded in blocks of 50 trials, at inter-trial intervals of
about 12 s. Here, we only use a subset of these data,
789
comprising the movements of left index ®nger (in the sequel
denoted by `L') right index ®nger (`R'), and toes (`F'). The
recordings were checked for artifacts, leaving a total of 223,
173, and 124 trials for the 3 subjects, (Table 1).
The EEG was recorded monopolarly from 56 Ag/AgCl
scalp electrodes against a reference electrode ®xed on the tip
of the nose. The electrodes were arranged in a grid of 2.5 cm
spacing, covering the pre- and post central areas. The EEG
was ®ltered between 0.15 and 60 Hz, and sampled at 128
Hz. In addition, horizontal and vertical electro-oculograms
(EOGs) were recorded to detect eye-movements. For further
details about the experiment and recordings, see Pregenzer
et al. (1994), Pfurtscheller et al. (1994a,b).
2.2. Data analysis
2.2.1. The method of Common Spatial Patterns
A classi®cation task is usually broken up into two main
parts. The ®rst part is the extraction of relevant features that
capture the class-invariant characteristics from some trial.
The second part is the classi®cation proper, performed on
the extracted features. The core of the classi®cation method
that we propose here is that the feature extraction is realized
by projections of the high-dimensional, spatial-temporal
raw signals onto very few speci®cally designed spatial
®lters. These ®lters are designed in such a way that the
variances of the resulting signals carry the most discrimina-
tive information. The adjunct of the ®lters are called
Common Spatial Patterns, and they are obtained from a
set of calibration data by the method of CSP.
The features for the classi®cation proper are vectors
whose elements are the variances of the projected signals.
These feature vectors are ®nally classi®ed by simple linear
or quadratic Bayes classi®ers, whose parameters are
obtained again from the same set of calibration data, after
projection onto the CSPs obtained in the ®rst step.
An intrinsic limitation of the method of CSPs is that the
design of the most discriminative spatial ®lters is possible
only for the distinction between two conditions. So, we will
®rst consider only the design of optimal ®lters for this case,
and defer the extension to the classi®cation of 3 and more
conditions to the end of the next subsection.
We begin with two groups A and B of recordings of
relevant EEG data, represented as two groups of matrices.
The rows of each matrix contain the signals on one record-
ing electrode, while the columns contain the recordings of
all electrodes at some particular point in time. The dimen-
sion of each matrix is, therefore, N £ T, with N the number
of channels and T the number of samples in time. In our
case, we take the recording on 56 electrodes during the 500
ms interval immediately preceding movement onset, or 64
samples. Let V i denote such a matrix containing the raw data
of trial i. The method of CSPs now ®nds a decomposition of
the two groups of recordings into modes that are common to
both groups, but maximally suited to distinguish between
the groups. Mathematically, the method relies on the simul-
790 J. MuÈller-Gerking et al. / Clinical Neurophysiology 110 (1999) 787±798
taneous diagonalization of two matrices closely related to
the covariance matrices (Fukunaga, 1990). To summarize
brie¯y, for each of the two groups the columns of all
matrices are pooled to form two origin-centered point
clouds in an N-dimensional space. It is always possible to
®nd a linear transformation that renders a point cloud isotro-
pic. This transformation is called the `whitening transforma-
tion'. It is composed of a change of coordinate frame to the
frame de®ned by the point cloud's principal axes, followed
by stretching/compression of the cloud along the directions
of these axes by amounts changing all of its principal
moments to unit value. The essence of the CSP method
can now be stated as follows: if the transformation that
whitens the union of the two point clouds is applied to the
individual clouds, the two resulting clouds will have the
same principal axes, and their corresponding eigenvalues
will add up to the value one. This is easily seen: since the
whitening transformation is a linear operation, it commutes
with summation of the two point clouds. So since the
whitening transformation turns their union into an isotropic
distribution, the union of the individually transformed point
clouds is also isotropic. This is only possible if the two
individually transformed point clouds complement each
other as just described.
In consequence, the directions with the largest and the
smallest eigenvalues of one of the point clouds will be those
with the smallest and largest eigenvalues for the other cloud.
Similarly, the directions with the m largest eigenvalues of
one of the point clouds will be those with the m smallest
eigenvalues for the other cloud, and vice versa. So, in these
directions we see the largest differences between the proper-
ties of the two clouds, i.e. these directions are optimally
Fig. 1. The most important (upper row) and second most important (lower
row) common spatial patterns for the distinction of left ®nger movement
from right ®nger movement. Data set B6, ®ltered to 8±30 Hz. Left ®nger
movement leads, when compared with right ®nger movement, to enhanced
EEG amplitudes over C3, where the right hand representation is located
(left column, top). Similarly, right ®nger movement leads to increased EEG
amplitudes over the left hand representation (right column). See Section 4.1
for further explanation.
Fig. 2. The most important common spatial patterns for the distinction right
®nger movements (left column) versus right foot movements (right
column). Same notations as in Fig. 1. Right ®nger movements show
comparatively high EEG amplitudes over mid-central areas (left column,
bottom), while movements of the right foot are characterized by enhanced
amplitudes over C3.
suited to project data on, when the task is to discriminate
whether the data has the statistics of one cloud or the other.
So an additional rotation onto these directions yields the
®nal transformation sought. For a detailed mathematical
discussion see Appendix A. The decomposition of a trial
V i can be written as
h i21
V i ˆ P² Z i …1†
that is, each raw EEG V i is represented as a linear combina-
tion of time-invariant modes, the CSP in the N columns of
matrix [P ²] 21, with the new time series Z i as expansion
coef®cients. [P ²] 21 is a square N £ N matrix, and Z i has
the same dimensions as V i, namely, N £ T. As described
above, the method of CSPs determines the modes in such a
way that the variance of the ®rst row of Z i is maximal for the
trials of group A and at the same time minimal for the trials
of group B. On the other hand, the variance of the last row of
Z i is minimal for the trials of group A, and at the same time
maximal for the trials of group B. Similar, but weaker prop-
erties characterize the variance of the ®rst and last few rows
of Z i. This property of the decomposition into CSPs ensures
that the variances of the ®rst and last rows of Z i contain the
most relevant information for discriminating between the
two conditions A and B.
Note that the variance of a row of Z i can be high only if
the spatial distribution of the raw signals' amplitudes is
similar to the corresponding pattern, or mode. Since the
CSPs are obtained from movement-related EEG, these
patterns themselves provide information about the charac-
teristic EEG amplitude distribution relative to a comparison
of two types of movement. Examples of the most discrimi-
native CSPs for the pairwise comparison of ®nger and foot
movements are shown in Figs. 1±3. See Appendix A and the
¯ow-diagram in Fig. 4 for a detailed mathematical discus-
sion.
 J. MuÈller-Gerking et al. / Clinical Neurophysiology 110 (1999) 787±798 791

trial is counted as `L' only if both the L-R and the L-F
classi®cation returns `L'.

2.2.3. Cross-validation statistics

Fig. 3. Same as Fig. 2, but for the distinction left ®nger movements versus
foot movements. In this comparison, right foot movements lead to higher
EEG amplitudes over C4, while movements of the left ®nger shows higher
amplitudes over mid-central areas, as did right ®nger movement in Fig. 2,
where that was the ®nger movement to be distinguished from foot move-
ment. See Section 4.1 for further explanation.
In order to test the method optimally on the data available
to us, we performed the usual cross-validation procedure,
i.e. we repeatedly separated the whole data set into calibra-
tion- and test-sets, and classi®ed the data from the test set
with the classi®er obtained from the calibration set. A set of
calibration data was selected at random from the whole data
set, using about 80% of the data for this purpose, and the
projection matrix P ² was calculated from this subset. More
precisely, we randomly selected 45 trials in the case of
subjects A4 and B6 (15 trials from each movement class),
and 30 trials in the case of subject B8 for testing. From the
remaining trials we randomly selected the maximal number

2.2.2. Classi®cation using the method of CSP

The features we use for classi®cation are obtained from
the variances of the ®rst and last m rows of the expansion
coef®cients Z i, since, by construction, they are the best
suited to distinguish between the two conditions. From a
set of reference or calibration data for two conditions we
calculate the projection matrix P ² as described above. From
this matrix we retain the ®rst and last m rows. They are our
spatial ®lters onto which all reference data are projected. Let
varpi be the variance of the p-th row of Z i, i.e. the variance of
the expansion to mode p. The feature vector for trial i is
composed of the 2 m variances varpi for p running from 1...m
and from N 2 m 1 1¼N, normalized by the total variance of
the projections retained, and log-transformed,
0 1
B C
B varip C
fpi B
ˆ logB 2m C …2†
C
@ P i A
varp
pˆ1

The transformation to logarithmic values is done in order to

make the distribution of the elements in f i normal. The
feature vectors from the calibration data are used to estimate
the parameters of a linear (or quadratic) Bayesian classi®er
(Fukunaga, 1990). To classify new data, we again obtain the
feature vector Eq. (2) for the new data using the spatial
®lters obtained from the calibration data, and feed this
feature vector into the classi®er. See Appendix B and Fig.
5 for more details on the classi®cation procedure.
The method of CSPs only works for the distinction of two Fig. 4. Illustration of how the classi®ers are obtained from the calibration
groups of data. For 3 and more conditions, we therefore data in two steps. The ®rst step obtains the most discriminating spatial
perform independent pairwise classi®cations between all ®lters from two sets of calibration data by the method of CSPs (a). These
conditions in the way described above. In our case, we spatial ®lters are subsequently used to transform the same calibration data
into feature space. The two sets of feature vectors obtained in this way are
classify L versus R, L versus F, and R versus F. A trial is
used to build a linear or quadratic classi®er (b). Mathematical details are
recognized for some of the classes, only if that class explained in Appendix A. The complete classi®er consists of the spatial
obtained the majority in all pairwise classi®cations. Other- ®lters (*) and the classi®ers for the feature vectors (**). Both are obtained
wise, the trial is classi®ed as indecisive. So, in our case a from the same set of calibration data.
792 J. MuÈller-Gerking et al. / Clinical Neurophysiology 110 (1999) 787±798
Fig. 5. The process of classi®cation of some EEG recording. After temporal
®ltering of all individual channels, the spatial-temporal recording is ®ltered
spatially by scalar multiplication with the 2m most discriminative spatial
patterns (*), obtained in step (a) of the classi®er design procedure (see Fig.
4). We obtain the feature vector by calculating the log of the normalized
variances of the thus obtained expansion coef®cients. This 2m dimensional
feature vector is classi®ed using the linear or quadratic classi®er (**) from
step (b) of the classi®er design procedure. For the discrimination of 3
classes, use the same scheme for each pair of conditions.
of trials for calibration in such a way that the calibration sets
were of equal size for all classes. The surplus trials were left
out of this run of the cross-validation. All data were then
transformed into feature space, a classi®er was built on
calibration data in feature space, and the test data were
classi®ed. The classi®cation rates reported here were aver-
aged over 50 repetitions of this procedure.
2.2.4. Reference electrode
An important point in EEG analysis is the question of the
reference electrode. Pfurtscheller reports that the desyn-
chronization of sensorimotor rhythms is enhanced and
best localized when using the surface Laplacian derivation
(Pfurtscheller, 1988). Kuhlman already reported that m
activity was rarely seen in referential recordings and that
closely spaced bipolar derivations should be used instead
(Kuhlman, 1978). Most recently, McFarland et al. (1997)
compared different electrode references, performance in
EEG classi®cation, and found either common-average-
reference or large Laplacian derivation to yield the best
results.
The common-average-reference is obtained by re-refer-
encing each electrode to the mean of all electrodes. The
Laplacian derivation is calculated by Hjorth's method
(Hjorth, 1975), i.e. each electrode is re-referenced to the
average over its 4 nearest neighbors, assuming the electro-
des are arranged in the pattern of a square lattice, as in the
®gures below. In contrast to this small Laplacian, the
large Laplacian is obtained by re-referencing to the 4 equi-
distant next-nearest neighbors. Such electrodes in the mono-
polar montage that do not have 4 equidistant neighbors
(boundary electrodes) are omitted from further processing.
Therefore, in the case of the small Laplacian derivation, we
obtain 30 re-referenced electrodes from the original 56 ones.
In the case of the large Laplacian, ten channels remain.
Projection to spatial patterns obtained from all monopo-
larly recorded channels amounts to a common average refer-
ence, since the patterns are reference-free up to a constant.
Alternatively we also applied the CSP method to data that
have ®rst been transformed to a Laplacian derivation.
2.2.5. Temporal ®ltering
The common spatial patterns are sensitive only to the
spatial distribution of the variances of the EEGs from the
two populations; all time structure has been lost by the
averaging. The only information contained in those patterns
is where the variance of the EEG varies most when compar-
ing two conditions. Given the organization of the cortical
motor areas, this is the most relevant information when we
try to distinguish the types of movement in our experiment:
we expect the ®nger movements to mainly activate the
respective contralateral hand area, while foot movement
should mainly activate the medial foot area. However, as
already stated, the effects of these activations on the
measured EEG are not re¯ected to the same degree in all
frequency bands. In order to make use of this knowledge, we
worked with data which had been ®ltered to various
frequency bands. With ®ltered data, the common spatial
patterns provide insight into how the typical spatial distri-
bution of EEG variance looks for speci®c frequency bands.
Classi®cation accuracy was estimated for data ®ltered in 6
different frequency bands: a (8±12 Hz), lower a (La, 8±10
Hz); upper a (Ua, 10±12 Hz); b (19±26 Hz); g (38±42 Hz),
and a broad band of 8±30 Hz.
The ®lters we use are 25-point wide ideal-band-pass
®lters, which are convoluted with the signals (Percival and
Walden, 1993). These ®nite impulse response ®lters are
causal, i.e. they use only data prior in time. Times given
below are relative to the un®ltered recordings.
2.2.6. Implementation
All analysis and classi®cation routines were implemented
in LISP using Tierney's freely available XLISP-STAT
program (Tierney, 1990). For ®ltering, we used slightly
modi®ed routines from Percival and Walden's SAPA pack-
age (Percival and Walden, 1993).
3. Results
In this paper, we concentrate on the time segment 0.5±1 s
after RS. For most trials, this segment immediately precedes
the actual movement; in some trials, movement actually
happens within this time window. Classi®cation rates as
functions of experimental time will be presented else-
 J. MuÈller-Gerking et al. / Clinical Neurophysiology 110 (1999) 787±798
Table 2
The recognition rates (%, rounded) and sample standard deviations (in
parentheses) for 3 types of movement, based on features from the 4 most
important common spatial patterns. Data with common reference ®ltered
into different frequency bands. Bayes linear classi®er
Subject a La Ua b g 8±30 Hz
A4 89 (4) 84 (6) 90 (4) 79 (5) 64 (7) 91 (4)
B6 82 (5) 81 (5) 81 (5) 83 (4) 73 (7) 90 (4)
B8 69 (7) 55 (9) 73 (8) 60 (8) 35 (9) 82 (6)
where (MuÈller-Gerking, Pfurtscheller, and Flyvbjerg, in
preparation).
3.1. Common Spatial Patterns
Figs. 1±3 show the most important common spatial
patterns for the pairwise distinction of all types of move-
ment. Fig. 1 presents the four most distinctive patterns for
the discrimination of left versus right ®nger movements,
Fig. 2 shows those for the discrimination of right ®nger
versus foot movement, and Fig. 3 indicates those for the
distinction left ®nger versus foot movements. These patterns
were obtained with all data from subject B6, time-segment
0.5±1 s after RS, and ®ltered in the wide range 8 to 30 Hz.
The area shown is covered by the 56 recording electrodes,
which are arranged in a rectangular grid, 11 in each row.
The third row of electrodes (from bottom) comprises the
central electrodes; the missing frontal electrodes are left
blank. Each pattern has electrode positions marked with
small squares, except for 4 electrode positions marked
with larger black dots. The latter 4 positions correspond to
C3, Cz, C4 and Fz in the international 10-20 system. The
contour maps have been obtained by interpolation. Within
each pattern, the zero line is rarely crossed, and then only by
very small amounts. Due to this, and the fact that the sign of
the pattern is irrelevant, the textures representing the isova-
lues were chosen symmetrical around zero. This gave
clearer pictures. The top row of each ®gure shows the
most important pattern for the conditions to be discrimi-
nated (corresponding to ®rst and last column of matrix
[P ²] 21 in Eqs. (1) and (14). The second row shows the
second most important patterns (second and second to last
columns of matrix [P ²] 21) The left column in each ®gure
shows the two patterns that are most important for the char-
acterization of the ®rst condition, the right column shows
the patterns most important for the characterization of the
second condition.
In Fig. 1, we see that the most important pattern for
distinguishing condition L from condition R ± i.e. the
upper left pattern ± shows a ¯at region over the right hemi-
sphere, where the sensorimotor representation of the left
hand is located and a strong spot of increased EEG activity
right over C3, where the sensorimotor representation of the
right hand is approximately located. The two most impor-
tant patterns for distinguishing condition R from condition L
793
show a ¯at region of EEG signal over the left cortical areas,
and strongly enhanced activity on the right hemisphere, in
the one pattern frontal to C4 (right column, top), in the other
more parietal (right column, bottom). The second most
important pattern for condition L is less conclusive. In
brief, when comparing the EEG amplitudes for the condi-
tions L versus R, we ®nd the characteristic patterns to show
enhanced amplitudes over the respective ipsilateral somato-
sensory representations.
In the distinction of condition R to condition F, shown in
Fig. 2, the most important pattern for R shows a diffusely
increased amplitude over the right hemisphere shifted
towards parietal areas (left column, top), while the second
pattern shows strongly enhanced EEG amplitude over mid-
central sites, with a maximum at Cz (left column, bottom).
The corresponding ®rst pattern for condition F shows highly
enhanced amplitude over the left somatosensory area with a
maximum at electrode C3 (right column, top). The second
pattern of condition F is less conclusive (right column,
bottom). So, in the comparison R versus F, movement of
the right index ®nger is characterized by enhanced EEG
amplitude over central or right post-central areas, while
movement of the toes is characterize by increased ampli-
tudes over the left hand representation in sensorimotor
areas.
Fig. 3 concludes this series with the comparison L±F. The
most important patterns in the top row show the mirrored
behavior to the R±F patterns in Fig. 2: movement of the left
®nger results in highly enhanced EEG amplitude over the
central area, while movement of the toes is characterized by
greater EEG amplitudes near and over C4. The second most
important patterns show only little modulation. Note, that
since the quantity of interest is the variance of the raw
signals projected onto the respective pattern, the sign of
the modulation does not play any role; the only relevant
feature is the magnitude and location of the modulation.
The patterns obtained from data of subjects A4 and B8 are
qualitatively the same.
Patterns obtained from the data ®ltered to the lower a ,
upper a , and b bands all show the same general behavior,
justifying our use of the wide frequency range 8 to 30 Hz.
3.2. Classi®cation results
3.2.1. In¯uence of the frequency band
Table 2 shows the mean recognition rates (in percent,
rounded) obtained for discrimination of 3 types of move-
ment in different frequency bands. Values in parentheses are
sample standard deviations over 50 repetitions of the cross-
validation procedure (see Section 2.2.3). Features are from
projections of the ear-referenced data to the 4 most impor-
tant spatial patterns (m ˆ 2 in Eq. 2). In most cases, this led
to best performance. The best results (91 ^ 4, 90 ^ 4 and
82 ^ 6% for subjects A4, B6 and B8, respectively) were
obtained with a broad band-pass of 8±30 Hz. In the case of
subject A4, however, the information contained in the upper
794 J. MuÈller-Gerking et al. / Clinical Neurophysiology 110 (1999) 787±798

Table 3 improvement compared with the simple method is sensible

The recognition rates (%, rounded) and sample standard deviations (in for subjects A4 and B8.
parentheses) for 3 types of movement, based on features from the 4 most
important common spatial patterns. CSP method on data with common
reference (column CSP-CR), small Laplacian derivation (CSP-SL) and 3.2.3. In¯uence of the numbers of patterns
large Laplacian derivation (CSP-LL). Columns VAR-SL and VAR-LL The main free parameter of the classi®cation scheme is
list recognition rates with variances on channels C3, Cz and C4 as features, the number of projections to common spatial patterns used
referenced to small and large Laplacian, respectively. Bayes linear classi-
®er
to build the feature vector. Table 5 lists the mean scores for
all subjects and two frequency ranges, using different
Subject CSP-CR CSP-SL CSP-LL VAR-SL VAR-LL numbers of common spatial patterns: from 2 £ 1 to 2 £ 5
(m ˆ 1 to m ˆ 5). These results show that it barely matters
A4 91 (4) 94 (4) 94 (3) 87 (4) 88 (4)
B6 90 (4) 90 (4) 89 (4) 74 (6) 85 (5) how many patterns are used when the number falls in the
B8 82 (6) 84 (7) 79 (7) 66 (8) 77 (7) range shown. But m ˆ 2 and m ˆ 3 seems a slightly better
choice than the other values shown.

alpha band (10±12 Hz) leads to classi®cation results almost
as good as those obtained in the 8 ±30 Hz band (90 ^ 4 vs.
91 ^ 4%). In the case of the two other subjects taking the
broad band clearly improves the result.
3.2.2. In¯uence of the electrode reference
Table 3 shows a comparison of ®ve classi®cation schemes
for the data ®ltered in the wide band 8±30 Hz. The ®rst
column (CSP-CR) repeats the last column of Table 2 for
ease of comparison. Column CSP-SL lists the recognition
rates obtained with the CSP method for data after applica-
tion of the small Laplacian ®lter, while column CSP-LL
reports these rates for the case of data ®ltered by the large
Laplacian. In order to compare our method with a simple
alternative, columns VAR-SL and VAR-LL list the classi-
®cation rates obtained with the logarithm of the variances in
the band 8±30 Hz of channels C3, Cz, and C4 as features in a
linear classi®er, after application of the small and large
Laplacian, respectively. This corresponds approximately
to the approach taken by McFarland et al. (1997). Overall,
the CSP method on data pre-®ltered by the small Laplacian
performs best, followed by the CSP method applied to the
common referenced data. When we take the variances of the
channels overlying sensorimotor areas as features, we see
that indeed the large Laplacian references leads to sensible
improvements over the small Laplacian, as has been found
by McFarland et al. (1997). Taking the CSPs as additional
spatial ®lters improves the classi®cation rates by 5±7% over
the simple alternative.
Similarly, Table 4 shows the recognition rates for the
same classi®cation methods as in Table 3, but for move-
ments L and R only. Here, columns VAR-SL and VAR-LL
are based on the variances of channels C3 and C4 only. The
Table 4
Same notations as in Table 3, but for two-class (L-R) discriminations.
VAR-SL and VAR-LL are based on channels C3 and C4 only
Subject CSP-CR CSP-SL CSP-LL VAR-SL
A4 92 (5) 94 (5) 93 (4) 86 (6)
B6 94 (4) 93 (4) 92 (5) 84 (6)
B8 86 (7) 88 (7) 82 (9) 72 (10)
3.2.4. Linear versus quadratic Bayes classi®er
We also tested a Bayes quadratic classi®er against the
linear one discussed so far. Classi®cation successes turned
out to be almost identical between the two, with the linear
classi®er giving the better result with few exceptions.
Therefore, we give no results for the Bayes quadratic clas-
si®er here.
4. Discussion
4.1. Spatial patterns
The most discriminative spatial patterns shown in Figs.
1±3 are easily related to the ERD patterns found with move-
ment preparation and execution (e.g. Pfurtscheller et al.,
1996). For example, Fig. 1 shows that movements of the
left index ®nger as compared with the movements of the
right index ®nger are characterized by increased EEG activ-
ity on the electrodes overlying the ipsilateral hand represen-
tations of sensorimotor cortex, and vice versa for right ®nger
movements.
Stated equivalently, movements of an index ®nger lead to
comparatively little EEG amplitude over the contralateral
hand representation within sensorimotor cortex. Comparing
®nger movements to movements of the toes, we see that
®nger movement is now characterized by comparatively
high EEG amplitudes over mid-central areas, while foot
movements lead to high EEG amplitudes over the right
(left) sensorimotor cortex, when compared with movements
of the left (right) index ®nger. Turned around, we see that
foot movement leads to comparatively little EEG activity
over mid-central areas, and ®nger movements are character-
ized by decreased EEG amplitudes over the respective
contralateral areas. It is also seen that ®nger movements
lead to more localized patterns than movements of the
foot. This is due to the fact that hand representations in
VAR-LL sensorimotor areas are found on the cortical surface, while
foot representations are deep in the medial ®ssure, leading to
87 (6) a wider spreading over the scalp of these cortical signals.
90 (4)
These patterns are the basis for our feature extraction.
81 (7)
Used as spatial ®lters, these patterns lead to new signals
 J. MuÈller-Gerking et al. / Clinical Neurophysiology 110 (1999) 787±798
Table 5
The recognition rates as function of the number of common spatial patterns (®rst column) for two frequency ranges. Data referenced to small Laplacian.
# A4 Ua A4 8±30 Hz B6 Ua
2 £ 1 91 (4) 93 (4) 78 (5)
2 £ 2 92 (4) 94 (4) 81 (5)
2 £ 3 93 (4) 94 (4) 82 (5)
2 £ 4 93 (3) 94 (4) 81 (5)
2 £ 5 93 (3) 94 (4) 80 (5)
that are linear combinations or weighted averages of the
recordings from all electrodes in such a way that the ampli-
tudes of the new signals vary maximally between pairs of
conditions. The weighting coef®cients are obtained automa-
tically from the calibration data with respect to the impor-
tance of each electrode in discriminating two conditions.
Compared with other methods of selection and weighting
of electrodes, the method proposed here does not need their
extra classi®cation step used for ®nding the relevant elec-
trodes. The results, however, are compatible. Comparing,
for example, our Fig. 1 with Fig. 3 in Pregenzer et al.
(1994), we see that the latter is similar to a merge of the
most important CSPs for the discrimination of the two ®nger
movements. While ®nding the same areas important for
classi®cation, our method also ®nds the classi®cation rele-
vant features of the signal from these areas.
4.2. Recognition rates
The recognition rates that we obtained are better than
those obtained previously with other methods. In the case
of discrimination of 3 brain states (preparation of left hand,
right hand and foot movement) we found a classi®cation
rate of 84±94% for the 3 subjects (randomness level for
the discrimination of 3 states is 33.3%). In a similar para-
digm with feedback presentation, Kalcher et al. (1996)
reported a classi®cation accuracy of 60% for 3 class discri-
minators and 3 bipolar EEG channels. Differentiation
between two brain states (preparation of left vs. right hand
movement increased the classi®cation rate to 78±88%
(Pregenzer et al., 1994). This comparison between our
results obtained with spatial pre®ltering and linear discrimi-
nation and the results obtained with single-trial band power
estimates and DSLVQ algorithm (Pregenzer et al., 1994) for
a two-class problem shows that higher classi®cation rates
can be achieved with the spatial ®ltering technique.
We have to acknowledge, however, that there is a high
variability of the classi®cation rates between subjects, and
even within the same dataset, e.g. when varying the time
segments' length or the segments' position in time. A fair
comparison of methods is, therefore, dif®cult in general, and
a comparison of recognition rates alone will not provide full
insight into some methods' capabilities. With this reserva-
tion, we believe that the comparison of methods presented
here gives a valid account of the methods' abilities.
Initially, we were surprised to ®nd that the time evolution
795
B6 8±30 Hz B8 Ua B8 8±30 Hz
89 (4) 73 (8) 82 (8)
90 (4) 75 (8) 84 (7)
90 (4) 74 (6) 82 (6)
88 (4) 73 (8) 81 (7)
87 (4) 72 (8) 81 (6)
of the EEG is of almost no importance as long as we restrict
the signals to the broad frequency band of 8±30 Hz. Inspec-
tion of the EEG data, however, demonstrated that in all 3
subjects, the desynchronization was present in both the
alpha and beta bands. Therefore, a good classi®cation result
for the broad band could be expected. This broad band
desynchronization is also the reason why almost as good
recognition rates were observed with the simple alternative
method and only two or 3 channels. It must be kept in mind
that many subjects do not display a signi®cant ERD in the
alpha or beta band. The fact that the quadratic classi®er
performed slightly worse than the linear one, suggests that
the data are very well separable by a linear separator. More
sophisticated classi®cation schemes, such as neural
networks, will most probably not only introduce unneces-
sary complications and computational demands, but will
often also perform worse, because of the bias-variance
dilemma. Comparison of a linear classi®er with a neural
network based classi®er, both applied to single-trial EEG
data recorded during right and left hand movement, revealed
similar results (Lugger et al., 1998).
The method we propose here is more complicated than
the simple alternatives considered in Tables 3 and 4.
However, there is ®rstly a sensible gain in recognition accu-
racy. Second, the increased effort does not induce longer
processing times for classi®cation. Once the characteristic
patterns are calculated, the only additional processing
required are a few scalar products, which any signal proces-
sing hardware can perform in real time. A software solution
would induce at most a minimal delay. In particular for two-
class discriminations, e.g. right versus left ®nger move-
ments, the additional effort is negligible. Thus, this method
seems quite a promising ingredient for a system for online
classi®cation. Furthermore, the method is highly robust to
changes in its parameters. Therefore is no need for ®ne-
tuning to a particular data set, a fact which suggests the
use of this method as a standard tool.
The only problem that we encountered using our method
is connected with the estimation of the covariance matrices.
Evidently, these matrices are crucial for the derivation of the
spatial ®lters. So far, we only used the sample covariance as
estimator. This estimator is non-robust with unbounded
in¯uence function, which basically means that a single
misbehaving trial or even a recording channel in the cali-
bration set can make its results meaningless. Obviously, the
chance of some recording artifact increases linearly with the
796 J. MuÈller-Gerking et al. / Clinical Neurophysiology 110 (1999) 787±798

number of channels. Temporal ®ltering, in particular the it reads

lower cut off, alleviates some common sources of EEG
artifacts, such as sudden shifts in DC level. Nevertheless, Vai Vai²
Ria ˆ   …3†
the use of a robust estimator would be highly advisable. A trace Vai Vai²
second dif®culty arises from the high dimension of these
covariance matrices. The number of parameters to be esti- The matrix products in this expression amounts to aver-
mated goes with the square of the number of recording aging over time. Let Rbi denote the corresponding normal-
channels. In consequence, recording from a larger number ized covariance matrices for the trials of condition b. The
of electrodes does not necessarily lead to better recognition normalization is done in order to eliminate trial-to-trial
results, simply due to the number of parameters that have to variations in the absolute values of the moments. Next,
be estimated rises much faster than the information gained the normalized covariance matrices are averaged over trials,
by additional electrodes. The solution to this dif®culty Ra ˆ kRia ltrials …4†
would be a structured estimator that explicitly uses a priori
information about the correlations of neighboring electro- and Rb equivalently for condition B.
des. Currently such a robust structured estimator of the We then build the composite covariance matrix
spatial covariance, especially tailored for surface EEG Rc ˆ Ra 1 Rb …5†
recordings, does not exist. Its development would be highly
desirable. which can be factored into its eigenvectors by
To conclude, we have demonstrated a method to devise
Rc ˆ Bc lB²c …6†
spatial ®lters that extract features relevant for the classi®ca-
tion of movement-related multi-channel EEG recordings. where Bc is an N £ N matrix of normalized eigenvectors,
These ®lters are optimal, in the sense that data projected BcBc² ˆ 1N£N, and l is the corresponding diagonal N £ N
onto these ®lters differ maximally (in the least squares matrix of eigenvalues.
sense) between pairwise conditions. While already provid- The whitening transformation
ing excellent recognition rates, the method presented here
probably still has margins of improvement, in particular in W ˆ l21=2 B²c …7†
the use of robust statistics and the use of a tailored estimator equalizes the variances in the space spanned by the eigen-
for the spatial covariance matrix. vectors in Bc. Now (Fukunaga, 1990), if the individual
covariance matrices Ra and Rb are transformed by
Acknowledgements Sa ˆ WRa W ² and Sb ˆ WRb W ² …8†

J.M.G. gratefully acknowledges fruitful discussions with then Sa and Sb share the same eigenvectors, since Sa 1 Sb ˆ
P. Grassberger, J. Martinerie, C. Neuper, B. Peters, B. WRcW² ˆ 1N£N. That is, if the eigendecomposition of Sa
Renault and F. Varela. H.F. thanks W. Bialek for useful reads
discussions. The research was partially supported by the Sa ˆ U c a U ² …9†
`Fonds zur FoÈrderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung'
in Austria, project P11208MED. with orthonormal U, then
S b ˆ U cb U ² …10†
Appendix A. The method of Common Spatial Patterns
and the corresponding eigenvalues for the two matrices sum
We describe here the mathematical part of the method of up to 1
Common Spatial Patterns as used in the present article. See ca 1 cb ˆ I …11†
Fig. 4 for a ¯ow-diagram of the procedure of classi®er
design, and Fig. 5 for ¯ow-diagram of the process of classi- In consequence, the projection of whitened EEG epochs
®cation. on U will give us feature vectors that are optimal in the least
Let Vai denote the raw data of trial i, condition a repre- squares sense for discriminating between the two popula-
sented as an N £ T matrix with N the number of channels and tions. With the projection matrix
T the number of samples in time. Thus, the recording at a P² ˆ U ² W …12†
given point in time can be represented as point in N-dimen-
sional Euclidean space, and one EEG can be seen as a the decomposition of each trial writes
distribution of T such points. Since the constant part of Z i ˆ P² V i …13†
the EEGs has been removed by frequency ®ltering, the
mean of this distribution is zero. So the ®rst place to look Inverting this equation
for characteristic information is in its second moments, or h i21
covariance matrix. After normalizing with its total variance, V i ˆ P² Z i …14†
 J. MuÈller-Gerking et al. / Clinical Neurophysiology 110 (1999) 787±798
we see that each raw EEG is decomposed into the set of
CSPs (columns of [P ²] 2l) with the new time series Zi as
expansion coef®cients. The CSPs can, therefore, be seen
as source distribution matrix with Zi the corresponding
source wave form matrix.
Appendix B. Classi®er design
We recall brie¯y the equations of the quadratic and linear
Bayes classi®er for Gaussian distributed
!
data that we used to
obtain the present results. Let M i be the center of the cali-
bration vectors for class i, Si their sample covariance matrix,
and Pi the a priori probability of this class. In our particular
case, we perform only two-class discriminations on this
level of processing, and the a priori probabilities are
equal. But the equations hold for any number of classes.
The classi®cation rule for the quadratic Bayes classi®er
can be written in distance notation. That is, we de®ne a
!
distance between a sample point x that is to be classi®ed,
and each of the classes i:
 ² X  
1 ! ! ! 1 X
diQ ˆ x 2Mi 21
i ~x 2 M i 1 lnu i u 2 lnPi
2 2
…15†
where ² means the transpose, and u´udenotes the determinant.
x~ is classi®ed into that class i, for which diQ is minimal over
all classes.
Eq. (15) can be linearized by setting Si ˆ S for all classes,
i.e. estimating S as the covariance matrix of all calibration
vectors from all classes. A simple calculation reduces Eq. 15
to
! X
21 ! 1 ! X 21 !
diL ˆ M ²i x 2 M ²i M i 1 lnPi …16†
2 Pfurtscheller G, Flotzinger D, Neuper C. Differentiation between ®nger, toe
! and tongue movement in man based on 40 Hz EEG. Electroenceph clin
In the linearized case, some sample point x is classi®ed
into that class i, for which diL is maximized (due to a change
in sign). For more information about classi®er design, see
Fukunaga (1990).
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