ArticlePsychophysiology2018
How many trials does it take to get a significant ERP effect? It depends.
Article in Psychophysiology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 128 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
128 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Heartbeat-Evoked Responses in M/EEG: A Systematic Review of Methods With Suggestions for Analysis and Reporting.Psychophysiology · 2026Pooled it
- Exploring the factors associated with professional and non-professional dancer well-being: a comprehensive systematic review.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Meta-analysis of ERP investigations of pain empathy underlines methodological issues in ERP research.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2018Pooled it
- Theta/Beta Ratio Neurofeedback Effects on Resting and Task-Related Theta Activity in Children with ADHD.Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback · 2025Trial
- Influence of acculturation on the ERP correlates of self- and other-referencing.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- The influence of effort expenditure on the neurophysiological substrates of reward processing in early adolescence.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- From head to toe: Efficient somatosensory mapping with fast stimulation and multivariate pattern analysis.Neuroimage. Reports · 2026Article
- Neural correlates of asymmetric switch costs during affective task switching.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Song Familiarity Relies on Evidence Accumulation.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Dissociable Trait Correlates of P300 Variability and Amplitude: Conscientiousness and Disinhibition.Psychophysiology · 2026Article
- Social anxiety is associated with greater autonomic and visuocortical generalization of conditioned aversive responses to faces.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Preliminary Evidence of Inhibitory and Error-Related Neural Alterations Associated with Early Relapse in Cocaine Use Disorder: A Retrospective Go/No-Go Event-Related Potential Study.European addiction research · 2026Article
- Enhanced Neural Responses to Self-Name Stimuli Relative to Tone and Reversed Speech Deviants in the Auditory Oddball Paradigm.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Fixation-related potentials reveal that confusing program code elicits a late frontal positivity.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Blunted No-Go P3 predicts faster increases in disordered eating symptoms in early adolescents: A four-wave longitudinal study.Research square · 2026Article
- Using N400 Event-Related Potential to Detect Differences in Design-Mode and Belief-Mode Scaffold Use.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Parallel electrophysiological and prefrontal hemodynamic alterations during stroop task performance in major depressive disorder: a simultaneous EEG-fNIRS study.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Visual exposure to masked faces benefits personally familiar but not famous face recognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Comments on "Pain-Related Fear Modulates Attentional Bias for Threat Processing in Chronic Pain: An ERP Study" [Letter].Journal of pain research · 2026Article
- Adolescent Risky Alcohol Use Is Associated With Electrophysiological Markers of Error Processing: Findings From a Large Cohort Study.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
68 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In designing an ERP study, researchers must choose how many trials to include, balancing the desire to maximize statistical power and the need to minimize the length of the recording session. Recent studies have attempted to quantify the minimum number of trials needed to obtain reliable measures for a variety of ERP components. However, these studies have largely ignored other variables that affect statistical power in ERP studies, including sample size and effect magnitude. The goal of the present study was to determine whether and how the number of trials, number of participants, and effect magnitude interact to influence statistical power, thus providing a better guide for selecting an appropriate number of trials. We used a Monte Carlo approach to measure the probability of obtaining a statistically significant result when testing for (a) the presence of an ERP effect, (b) within-participant condition differences in an ERP effect, and (c) between-participants group differences in an ERP effect. Each of these issues was examined in the context of the error-related negativity and the lateralized readiness potential. We found that doubling the number of trials recommended by previous studies led to more than a doubling of statistical power under many conditions. Thus, when determining the number of trials that should be included in a given study, researchers must consider the sample size, the anticipated effect magnitude, and the noise level, rather than relying solely on general recommendations about the number of trials needed to obtain a "stable" ERP waveform.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.