Schubert Anna-Lena, Löffler Christoph, Hagemann Dirk, Sadus Kathrin
Department of Psychology, University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany.
Institute of Psychology, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.
Psychophysiology. 2023 Feb;60(2):e14165. doi: 10.1111/psyp.14165. Epub 2022 Aug 22.
Individual differences in processing speed are consistently related to individual differences in cognitive abilities, but the mechanisms through which a higher processing speed facilitates reasoning remain largely unknown. To identify these mechanisms, researchers have been using latencies of the event-related potential (ERP) to study how the speed of cognitive processes associated with specific ERP components is related to cognitive abilities. Although there is some evidence that latencies of ERP components associated with higher-order cognitive processes are related to intelligence, results are overall quite inconsistent. These inconsistencies likely result from variations in analytic procedures and little consideration of the psychometric properties of ERP latencies in relatively small sample studies. Here we used a multiverse approach to evaluate how different analytical choices regarding references, low-pass filter cutoffs, and latency measures affect the psychometric properties of P2, N2, and P3 latencies and their relations with cognitive abilities in a sample of 148 participants. Latent correlations between neural processing speed and cognitive abilities ranged from -.49 to -.78. ERP latency measures contained about equal parts of measurement error variance and systematic variance, and only about half of the systematic variance was related to cognitive abilities, whereas the other half reflected nuisance factors. We recommend addressing these problematic psychometric properties by recording EEG data from multiple tasks and modeling relations between ERP latencies and covariates in latent variable models. All in all, our results indicate that there is a substantial and robust relationship between neural processing speed and cognitive abilities when those issues are addressed.
加工速度的个体差异始终与认知能力的个体差异相关，但更高的加工速度促进推理的机制在很大程度上仍不为人知。为了确定这些机制，研究人员一直使用事件相关电位（ERP）的潜伏期来研究与特定ERP成分相关的认知过程速度如何与认知能力相关。尽管有一些证据表明与高阶认知过程相关的ERP成分潜伏期与智力有关，但总体结果相当不一致。这些不一致可能是由于分析程序的差异以及在相对较小样本研究中对ERP潜伏期心理测量特性的考虑不足所致。在这里，我们采用多宇宙方法来评估关于参考、低通滤波器截止频率和潜伏期测量的不同分析选择如何影响148名参与者样本中P2、N2和P3潜伏期的心理测量特性及其与认知能力的关系。神经加工速度与认知能力之间的潜在相关性在-.49至-.78之间。ERP潜伏期测量包含大约相等比例的测量误差方差和系统方差，并且只有大约一半的系统方差与认知能力相关，而另一半反映了干扰因素。我们建议通过记录来自多个任务的脑电图数据并在潜在变量模型中对ERP潜伏期与协变量之间的关系进行建模来解决这些有问题的心理测量特性。总而言之，我们的结果表明，当解决这些问题时，神经加工速度与认知能力之间存在实质性且稳健的关系。
