Various approaches have been taken over the years to quantify event-related potential (ERP) responses and these approaches may vary in their utility connecting empirical research and scientific claims. In this work we compared different quantification methods as well as the influence of three reference methods (linked mastoids, average reference, and current source density) on the resulting ERP amplitude. We use the experimental effects and effect sizes (Cohen's d) to evaluate the different methodological variants and we calculate intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC). In addition, the bootstrapped standard error of the means (SME, Luck et al., 2021), which was recently suggested as a quality criterion for ERP research, is used for this purpose. Our example for an ERP is the feedback-related negativity (FRN) to feedback about trustee behavior in a trust game with participants in the trustor position. We found that the quantification methods concerning the FRN influenced the absolute value of condition effects in the experimental paradigm. Yet, the patterns of effects were detected by all chosen methods, except for the ‘individual difference wave’-based peak window approach. In addition, our findings stress the importance of checking the reference electrodes concerning effects of the experimental conditions. Furthermore, interactions of topographical distribution and reference choice should be considered. Finally, we were able to show that the SME is lower for more datapoints that are given in the quantification period of the FRN, and higher for more negative FRN amplitudes. These biases may lead to divergence of SME and effect size detection. Therefore, if the SME was used to compare different processing choices one should consider controlling for these important aspects of the data and possibly include other quality criteria like effect sizes.

中文翻译：

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信任博弈中量化方法和参考方案对反馈负性及反馈负性幅值标准化测量误差的影响探讨

多年来，人们采取了各种方法来量化事件相关电位（ERP）反应，这些方法在连接实证研究和科学主张方面的效用可能有所不同。在这项工作中，我们比较了不同的量化方法以及三种参考方法（链接乳突、平均参考和电流源密度）对所得 ERP 幅度的影响。我们使用实验效应和效应大小（Cohen's d）来评估不同的方法变体，并计算组内相关系数（ICC）。此外，最近被建议作为 ERP 研究的质量标准的均值自举标准误差 (SME, Luck et al., 2021) 也用于此目的。我们的 ERP 示例是反馈相关消极性 (FRN)，用于反馈信任博弈中受托人的行为，参与者处于信任者位置。我们发现，FRN 的量化方法影响了实验范式中条件效应的绝对值。然而，除了基于“个体差异波”的峰值窗口方法之外，所有选定的方法都检测到了效应模式。此外，我们的研究结果强调了检查参考电极对实验条件影响的重要性。此外，还应考虑地形分布和参考选择的相互作用。最后，我们能够证明，对于 FRN 量化期间给出的数据点越多，SME 越低，对于负 FRN 幅度越多，SME 越高。这些偏差可能会导致 SME 和效应量检测的分歧。因此，如果使用 SME 来比较不同的处理选择，则应考虑控制数据的这些重要方面，并可能包括其他质量标准，例如效应大小。