Exploring the impact of manual and automatic EEG pre-processing methods on interpersonal neural synchrony measures in parent-infant hyperscanning studies

This database includes the raw data linked with the paper “Exploring the impact of manual and automatic EEG pre-processing methods on interpersonal neural synchrony measures in parent-infant hyperscanning studies”, accepted for publication on Journal of Neuroscience Methods. This publication is part of the “2-Brain Regulation for Improved Neuroprotection during Early Development (2-BRAINED)” research project. In this paper, we explore how the degree of automatization of parent-infant electroencephalography (EEG) data pre-processing pipelines impacts measures of brain-to-brain co-regulation. Procedures EEG data collected on 31 mother-infant dyads (8-10 months) engaged in a Face-to-Face Still-Face Procedure were pre-processed with two version of the same pipeline, the “automated” (no involvement of the coder) and the “manual” (involvement of the coder in artifact rejection). Mother-infant brain-to-brain co-regulation was estimated after automated and after manual pre-processing via computation of cross-frequency Phase-Locking Value (PLV) in the theta and alpha frequency bands. Analytical plan Differences in the main pre-processing outputs, such as the number of interpolated channels, percentage of rejected ICs and number of rejected epochs per episode were assessed via Student’s t-tests for paired samples. PLVs obtained after automated and manual pre-processing were compared via repeated measures ANOVA (Pipeline and FFSF Episode as factors) and Pearson’s correlations. Findings in brief PLVs computed in the theta, but not alpha, frequency band were significantly higher after automated pre-processing than after manual pre-processing. Moreover, the automated pipeline rejected a significantly lower percentage of ICs and epochs compared to the manual pipeline.