A multilab investigation into the N2pc as an indicator of attentional selectivity: Direct replication of Eimer (1996).

Abstract

The N2pc is widely employed as an electrophysiological marker of an attention allocation. This interpretation was largely driven by the observation of an N2pc elicited by an isolated relevant target object, which was reported as Experiment 2 in Eimer (1996). All subsequent refined interpretations of the N2pc had to take this crucial finding into account. Despite its central role for neurocognitive attention research, there have been no direct replications and only few conceptual replications of this seminal work. Within the context of #EEGManyLabs, an international community-driven effort to replicate the most influential EEG studies ever published, the present study was selected due to its strong impact on the study of selective attention. We revisit the idea of the N2pc being an indicator of attentional selectivity by delivering a high powered direct replication of Eimer's work through analysis of 779 datasets acquired from 22 labs across 14 countries. Our results robustly replicate the N2pc to form stimuli, but a direct replication of the N2pc to color stimuli technically failed. We believe that this pattern not only sheds further light on the functional significance of the N2pc as an electrophysiological marker of attentional selectivity, but also highlights a methodological problem with selecting analysis windows a priori. By contrast, the consistency of observed ERP patterns across labs and analysis pipelines is stunning, and this consistency is preserved even in datasets that were rejected for (ocular) artifacts, attesting to the robustness of the ERP technique and the feasibility of large-scale multilab EEG (replication) studies.