Safe and sensible baseline correction of pupil-size data
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Neuroscience, Ophthalmology, Psychiatry and Psychology, Statistics
- Keywords
- pupillometry, eye movements, behavioral research methods, baseline correction, analysis, pupil size
- Copyright
- © 2017 Mathôt et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Safe and sensible baseline correction of pupil-size data. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2725v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2725v1
Abstract
Measurement of pupil size (pupillometry) has recently gained renewed interest from psychologists, but there is little agreement on how pupil-size data is best analyzed. Here we focus on one aspect of pupillometric analyses: baseline correction, that is, analyzing changes in pupil size relative to a baseline period. Baseline correction is useful in experiments that investigate the effect of some experimental manipulation on pupil size. In such experiments, baseline correction improves statistical power by taking into account random fluctuations in pupil size over time. However, we show that baseline correction can also distort data if unrealistically small pupil sizes are recorded during the baseline period, which can easily occur due to eye blinks, data loss, or other distortions. Divisive baseline correction (corrected pupil size = pupil size / baseline) is affected more strongly by such distortions than subtractive baseline correction (corrected pupil size = pupil size - baseline). We make four recommendations for safe and sensible baseline correction of pupil-size data: 1) use subtractive baseline correction; 2) visually compare your corrected and uncorrected data; 3) be wary of pupil-size effects that emerge faster than the latency of the pupillary response allows (within ±220 ms after the manipulation that induces the effect); and 4) remove trials on which baseline pupil size is unrealistically small (indicative of blinks and other distortions).
Author Comment
This manuscript-in-progress is provided for community feedback, and will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal.