Conducting Event-Related Potential (ERP) Research With Young Children

Abstract

<jats:p> Abstract. There has been an unprecedented increase in the number of research studies employing event-related potential (ERP) techniques to examine dynamic and rapidly occurring neural processes with children during the preschool and early childhood years. Despite this, there has been relatively little discussion of the methodological and procedural differences that exist for studies of young children versus older children and adults. That is, reviewers, editors, and consumers of this work often expect developmental studies to simply apply adult techniques and procedures to younger samples. Procedurally, this creates unrealistic expectations for research paradigms, data collection, and data reduction and analyses. Scientifically, this leads to inappropriate measures and methods that hinder drawing conclusions and advancing theory. Based on ERP work with preschoolers and young children from 10 laboratories across North America, we present a summary of the most common ERP components under study in the area of emotion and cognition in young children along with 13 realistic expectations for data collection and loss, laboratory procedures and paradigms, data processing, ERP averaging, and typical challenges for conducting this type of work. This work is intended to supplement previous guidelines for work with adults and offer insights to aid researchers, reviewers, and editors in the design and evaluation of developmental research using ERPs. Here we make recommendations for researchers who plan to conduct or who are conducting ERP studies in children between ages 2 and 12 years, focusing on studies of toddlers and preschoolers. Recommendations are based on both data and our cumulative experience and include guidelines for laboratory setup, equipment and recording settings, task design, and data processing. </jats:p>

Adjusting ADJUST: Optimizing the ADJUST Algorithm for Pediatric Data Using Geodesic Nets

“…Due to their shorter attention spans, children are more likely to lose interest in completing EEG tasks if capping takes a long time. Similarly, with infants, the longer capping takes the more likely the infant is to get upset, which will result in the collection of noisy EEG data during the task; in order to allow children and infants to complete more trials, capping should happen as quickly as possible (Brooker,et al, 2019). As such, geodesic nets are quite popular in developmental research.…”

Adapting event‐related potential research paradigms for children: Considerations from research on the development of recognition memory

“…General recommendations for adapting laboratory tasks for children Brooker et al (2020) recently provided general recommendations for adapting ERP laboratory tasks for children. These recommendations were to include practice trials, minimize the number of trials, block trials to allow children breaks, equatie task difficulty across age groups, and provide trial-by-trial feedback (Brooker et al, 2020).…”

“…Second, tasks should minimize recording time to the extent possible (Brooker et al, 2020). ERP studies with adults often last multiple hours because higher trial numbers improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the ERP waveforms (Luck, 2014).…”

“…ERP studies with adults often last multiple hours because higher trial numbers improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the ERP waveforms (Luck, 2014). However, recording for long durations with children reduces task-directed attention, increases movementrelated artifacts, and increases the probability of children refusing to complete the study (Brooker et al, 2020). For this reason, ERP tasks for toddlers and preschool-aged children typically last approximately 10-15 min (Brooker et al, 2020;see Howard et al, 2020, for empirical example).…”

“…Most developmental event-related potential (ERP) research uses experimental paradigms that were modified from tasks originally designed for adults (Brooker et al, 2020). One challenge for developmental researchers is identifying how to effectively adapt ERP research paradigms for younger individuals.…”