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Event-Triggered Analysis

Plugins for the Open Ephys GUI that analyse continuous data in windows locked to an event — a TTL edge or a broadcast message.

Plugin Appears in the GUI as What it does
Triggered Average Triggered Avg Time-domain average and standard deviation, with individual trials
Receptive Field Bar Mapper RF Barmapper Visual receptive fields, back-projected from the per-direction trial averages of a sweeping bar
Triggered Power Triggered Power Power spectra accumulated across trials and split by condition
Triggered Coherence Triggered Coherence Work-in-progress: Magnitude-squared coherence and coherency phase for configured channel pairs

Triggered Coherence is work in progress

It builds, loads and computes, and the estimator is tested numerically — but it has no pre-trigger baseline (#16) and its pair edits are not undoable (#14).

A signal chain with a triggered plugin in it

What they have in common

All four sit on the same capture layer:

  • The same trigger model. A trigger source is one experimental condition. It names a TTL line and, optionally, three broadcast-message patterns — arm, cancel and commit. See Triggers and messages.
  • The same trial window. Pre and Post milliseconds around the trigger, plus a channel selection. Cost is linear in the number of selected channels.
  • The same three editor buttons. TRIGGERS (the condition table), MONITOR (per-source counters) and ANALYSIS (everything that reshapes the accumulators).
  • The same trigger-table file. SAVE and LOAD in the TRIGGERS popup move a whole condition table between plugins.
  • The same session format. Triggered Average and the Bar Mapper write a directory of one XML manifest plus one .npy per array, readable in Python and MATLAB.

Where to start

Notes

  • All per-trial work runs in the background, off the data-acquisition path.
  • There is no decimation here. Put a downsampling plugin upstream if you want to analyse a reduced sample rate.
  • Coherence is only meaningful pooled over trials — a single trial has coherence 1 by construction.
  • The receptive-field mapping is recomputed in the background, so map settings can be changed without recapturing anything.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later. Copyright © 2025–2026 Joscha Schmiedt, Universität Bremen; parts © 2022 Open Ephys.