Minimal condition repetitions required in rapid serial visual presentation decoding paradigms

Abstract Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) decoding paradigms allow testing a greater number of conditions than was previously possible within short experimental sessions. However, in these designs individual neural responses may be more susceptible to noise due to responses overlapping with adjacent epochs. This study investigates the minimum number of repetitions required for reliable decoding accuracies in RSVP decoding paradigms. We used previously published EEG data and conducted a standard decoding analysis while varying the number of repetitions used. We found that it is possible to obtain reliable decoding accuracies with only around six repetitions of each condition, which has important implications for research questions that require short experiments, particularly for studying populations who may not be able to tolerate longer or more demanding protocols. These findings highlight the potential benefits of using efficient RSVP decoding designs and conducting short experiments and may have far-reaching impacts in cognitive neuroscience, by providing insights into optimizing data collection methods for diverse populations and experimental protocols.