BOOTSTRAPPING THE P300 IN APPLIED PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY: EVALUATING PRECISION
IN DIAGNOSTIC TESTS
Abstract
Background: In applied psychophysiology, bootstrapping procedures are
often used to classify individuals into one of two or more independent
states (e.g., high risk vs low risk). Although the number of iterations
required for a reliable bootstrap test is not universally agreed upon,
some research (Rosenfeld et al., 2017b) suggests that 100 iterations is
a sufficient number to obtain reliable results when analyzing P300 from
a concealed information test. However, no study to-date has evaluated
the diagnostic consistency of the 100 iterations test across repeated
examinations. Methods: We evaluated the precision of the 100 iteration
test by repeating the test 100 times per participant in a sample of 81
participants. The test was designed to classify participants as either
knowledgeable or not knowledgeable of critical information related to a
mock crime. Results: We found that the test provided variable
classifications in approximately a quarter of our sample (n = 19/81 or
23%), specifically when a participant’s score presented near the
diagnostic cutpoint. Moreover, the test’s diagnostic results varied by
as much as +/-15%, in certain cases. Conclusion: Although the test
provided reliable results for the majority of our sample, this was not
true for a notable number of cases. We recommend that researchers report
the variability of their diagnostic metrics and integrate this
variability when classifying individuals. We discuss several simple
examples of how to take variability into account when making
classifications, such as by calculating the probability of one
classification state over another given the data.