Electrode Placement

By Grace Lim for Neurotech@Davis

This figure depicts the International 10/20 System for electrode placement, which describes an Internationally recognized mapping for electrodes placed on the scalp. The letter describes the area of the brain the electrode is located, so for example, the “P” in P7 would stand for parietal lobe. The number describes the hemisphere and position of that electrode. For our purposes, the OpenBCI cyton board we use has the capacity for 8 electrodes, so if we wanted to use this map you would measure the distance from the nasion and inion using a measuring tape for standardization.

This map will come in handy as you focus on what kind of experiment you will create because you will want to focus your limited amount of electrodes on the area of interest. For example, if you were interested in studying visual attention for your EEG experiment, you would want to place electrodes on parietal and occipital regions. Areas near the frontal or temporal lobes wouldn’t be as important.