Researchers should disregard the first 90 seconds of a 2-minute resting baseline to allow physiological measures to stabilize.
Caution advised for early baseline segments in ECG/EEG recordings; leaves open standardized protocols for cardiovascular research.
This study examines current resting baseline practices in physiological measurement. Specifically, we investigated between- and within-baseline stability of two-minute resting periods for electrocardiography (ECG), cerebral bloodflow velocity (CBFV), function near-infrared imaging (fNIR), and electroencephalography (EEG). A 4 x 4 within subjects ANOVA revealed instability between and within baselines for several psychophysiological measures. Planned comparisons between the final 30 seconds of each resting period, however, revealed that most measures return to a stabilized level after a period of attenuation. Outcomes suggest that researchers disregard the first minute and thirty seconds of resting baselines to allow for this attenuation when using a full suite of physiological measures.
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Parchment et al. (2016) studied this question.
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