Mental chronometry in big noisy data

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 17; no. 6; p. e0268916
• Main Authors: Wascher, Edmund, Sharifian, Fariba, Gutberlet, Marie, Schneider, Daniel, Getzmann, Stephan, Arnau, Stefan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 08.06.2022; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Automation; Big data; Biology and Life Sciences; Computer and Information Sciences; Datasets; Electroencephalography - methods; Engineering and Technology; Error analysis; Estimation; Evaluation; Event-related potentials; Evoked Potentials; Humans; Information management; Inspection; Latency; LF noise; Management; Measuring instruments; Medicine and Health Sciences; Memory; Noise; Noise reduction; Reaction Time; Research and Analysis Methods; Social Sciences; Temporal resolution; Time perception; Germany
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0268916

Temporal measures (latencies) in the event-related potentials of the EEG (ERPs) are a valuable tool for estimating the timing of mental processes, one which takes full advantage of the high temporal resolution of the EEG. Especially in larger scale studies using a multitude of individual EEG-based tasks, the quality of latency measures often suffers from high and low frequency noise residuals due to the resulting low trial counts (because of compressed tasks) and because of the limited feasibility of visual inspection of the large-scale data. In the present study, we systematically evaluated two different approaches to latency estimation (peak latencies and fractional area latencies) with respect to their data quality and the application of noise reduction by jackknifing methods. Additionally, we tested the recently introduced method of Standardized Measurement Error (SME) to prune the dataset. We demonstrate that fractional area latency in pruned and jackknifed data may amplify within-subjects effect sizes dramatically in the analyzed data set. Between-subjects effects were less affected by the applied procedures, but remained stable regardless of procedure.