It is assumed that you have Matlab® 2008a or later, the Signal Processing Toolbox, Statistics Toolbox, EEGLAB and the SIFT toolbox. SIFT should work with all versions of EEGLAB (10 and later). This version of the tutorial was tested with EEGLAB 2023.1.

To get started, follow these steps:

1) Start MATLAB

2) Download EEGLAB. Add EEGLAB root folder to the path (File -> Set Path; Add Folder)

3) Type eeglab at the command prompt

4) Use EEGLAB menu item “Manage extension,” select SIFT, and install it

5) Optional: if you want to use the ARfit model-fitting algorithm. You must manually install as follows: Download the free ARfit package from https://climate-dynamics.org/software/#arfit. After downloading and unzipping the ARfit package, place the /arfit/ folder in SIFT-path/external/ where SIFT-path is the full path to the SIFT root directory.

6) Once the EEGLAB main GUI is visible, you are good to go! You will find SIFT under the EEGLAB menu: Tools->SIFT. SIFT will automatically be made accessible whenever you start EEGLAB.

Important note about SIFT GUIs: Unfortunately, SIFT GUIs have grown unstable over the years as the Mathworks (the makers of MATLAB) has modified the function supporting it (changing some of the parameters, the function may crash or return an error). For example, on MATLAB 2023a on MAC, it is not possible to use the GUI edit boxes. Therefore, using the command line to set different options is preferable in some cases. We have included command line calls equivalent to the GUI in this tutorial.

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