Evaluation of EEG pre-processing and source localization in ecological research

Introduction: Electroencephalography (EEG) source localization (SL) has shown potential for various applications, from epilepsy and seizure focus localization to psychiatric disorder evaluation. However, questions remain about its neurophysiological plausibility in real-world settings where only EEG signals are available without subject-specific anatomical information. This study investigates whether established pre-processing and source localization methods can produce neurophysiologically plausible activation patterns when applied to naturalistic EEG data without structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or digitized electrode positions. Methods: Proven methods are aggregated into an end-to-end pipeline that includes automatic pre-processing, eLORETA for source estimation, and a shared forward model derived from the ICBM 2009c Nonlinear Symmetric template and its corresponding CerebrA atlas. The pipeline is validated using two distinct datasets: the Healthy Brain Network (HBN) dataset comparing resting and naturalistic video-watching states and the multi-session and multi-task EEG cognitive dataset (COGBCI) comparing different cognitive workload levels. The validation approach focuses on whether the reconstructed source activations exhibit expected neurophysiological patterns via permutation testing. Results: Findings revealed significant differences between resting state and video-watching tasks, with greater activation in posterior regions during video-watching, consistent with known visual processing pathways. The cognitive workload analysis similarly showed progressive activation increases with task difficulty, mapping to regions associated with executive function. Discussion: These results prove that established source localization methods can produce neurophysiologically plausible activation patterns without subject-specific information, highlighting the strengths and limitations of applying these methods to mid-length naturalistic EEG data. This research demonstrates the viability of template-based source analysis for research settings where individual structural imaging is unavailable or impractical.