A lifespan comparison of the reliability, test‐retest stability, and signal‐to‐noise ratio of event‐related potentials assessed during performance monitoring

Abstract

The reliability, stability, and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of event-related potentials (ERPs) were investigated in children, adolescents, younger adults, and older adults in performance monitoring tasks. P2, N2, P3, and P2-N2 peak-to-peak amplitude showed high odd-even split reliabilities in all age groups, ranging from .70 to .90. Multigroup analyses showed that test-retest stabilities (across 2 weeks) of ERP amplitudes did not differ among the four age groups. In contrast, relative to adolescents and younger adults, SNRs were lower in children and older adults, with higher noise levels in children and lower signal power in older adults. We conclude that age differences in the SNR of stimulus-locked ERPs can be successfully compensated by the averaging procedure with about 40 trials in the average. However, age differences in baseline noise and split-half reliability should be considered when comparing age groups in single trial measures or time-varying processes with ERPs.

Auditory-evoked cortical activity: contribution of brain noise, phase locking, and spectral power

“…Taken together, these results suggest that brain noise as captured in ongoing EEG activity contributes to neural signaling (reviewed in Ref. [14]) and behavior, and evolves with age [14, 15] and disease state [16]. …”

“…This variability across networks and regions may impact ERPs differently depending on experimental manipulations and acquisition techniques. Moreover, variability in brain noise may explain inconsistent results among studies, with some showing similar noise levels for younger and older adults and others reporting increased noise levels for older adults [15]. Brain noise may also change with disease or damage.…”

“…Noise is typically calculated by measuring the variation in the EEG signal during a prestimulus period across trials [15]. However, this same time period preceding the stimulus is also used to normalize the ERP response and calculate peak amplitudes because prestimulus activity is typically assumed to have a minimal impact on stimulus-locked responses.…”

Frontal midline theta reflects anxiety and cognitive control: Meta-analytic evidence

“…Here, we used a random-effects meta-analysis to provide a comprehensive assessment of the evidence for convergence between measures of dispositional anxiety and FMΘ control signals (for more focused meta-analyses, see: Mathews et al, 2012; Moser et al, 2013). The decision to focus on dispositional anxiety was motivated in part by work demonstrating that ERP measures of conflict monitoring and control themselves represent trait-like individual differences (Hämmerer et al, 2013; Leue et al, 2013; Olvet and Hajcak, 2009a, 2009b; Segalowitz et al, 2010; Weinberg and Hajcak, 2011). …”

The psychometric properties of the late positive potential during emotion processing and regulation

“…These studies have repor ted moderate-to-high reliability for the oddball P3 (Fallgatter et al, 2001;Sandman and Patterson, 2000;Segalowitz and Barnes, 1993;Walhovd and Fjell, 2002;Williams et al, 2005), emotion-modulated electro-myographic (EMG) activity (Larson et al, 2000(Larson et al, , 2005Lee et al, 2009), the error-related negativity (ERN; Olvet and Hajcak, 2009b;Larson et al, 2010;Segalowitz et al, 2010) and several other stimulus-locked ERPs (i.e. the P2, N2 and P3; Hämmerer et al, 2013). Given the importance of attaining reliable measures (Nunnally, 1970;Tomarken, 1995), this recent focus on evaluating the reliability of commonly studied psychophysiological measures is both encouraging and quite valuable as it can facilitate the further refinement of these measures.…”