TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bürki-Foschini, Audrey Damaris
A1  - Frossard, Jaromil
A1  - Renaud, Olivier
T1  - Accounting for stimulus and participant effects in event-related potential analyses to increase the replicability of studies
JF  - Journal of neuroscience methods
N2  - Background: Event-related potentials (ERPs) are increasingly used in cognitive science. With their high temporal resolution, they offer a unique window into cognitive processes and their time course. In this paper, we focus on ERP experiments whose designs involve selecting participants and stimuli amongst many. Recently, Westfall et al. (2017) highlighted the drastic consequences of not considering stimuli as a random variable in fMRI studies with such designs. Most ERP studies in cognitive psychology suffer from the same drawback. New method: We advocate the use of the Quasi-F or Mixed-effects models instead of the classical ANOVA/by-participant F1 statistic to analyze ERP datasets in which the dependent variable is reduced to one measure per trial (e.g., mean amplitude). We combine Quasi-F statistic and cluster mass tests to analyze datasets with multiple measures per trial. Doing so allows us to treat stimulus as a random variable while correcting for multiple comparisons. Results: Simulations show that the use of Quasi-F statistics with cluster mass tests allows maintaining the family wise error rates close to the nominal alpha level of 0.05. Comparison with existing methods: Simulations reveal that the classical ANOVA/F1 approach has an alarming FWER, demonstrating the superiority of models that treat both participant and stimulus as random variables, like the Quasi-F approach. Conclusions: Our simulations question the validity of studies in which stimulus is not treated as a random variable. Failure to change the current standards feeds the replicability crisis.
KW  - Cluster mass
KW  - ERP
KW  - Quasi-F
KW  - Mixed-effects model
KW  - Replicability crisis
KW  - Stimulus as fixed-effect fallacy
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jneumeth.2018.09.016
SN  - 0165-0270
SN  - 1872-678X
VL  - 309
SP  - 218
EP  - 227
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -