Internal Consistency of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Electroencephalography Measures of Reward in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence.

BACKGROUND: Abnormal neural response to reward is increasingly thought to function as a biological correlate of emerging psychopathology during adolescence. However, this view assumes such responses have good psychometric properties-especially internal consistency-an assumption that is rarely tested.

METHODS: Internal consistency (i.e., spilt-half reliability) was calculated for event-related potentials (ERPs) and Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) responses to monetary gain and loss feedback from the same sample of 8-14 year-old females (n=177). Internal consistency for ERPs (i.e. feedback negativity) and BOLD responses within the ventral striatum and medial/lateral prefrontal cortex to gain, loss, difference scores (gain-loss), and residual scores (gain controlling for loss) were compared. Moderation analyses were conducted to investigate whether internal consistency differed by age.

RESULTS: ERP and BOLD responses to gain and loss feedback showed high internal consistency in all regions ( Spearman Brown Coefficients ( SB ) ≥ 0.70). When considering difference and residual scores, however, responses showed lower internal consistency ( SB s ≤ 0.50), with particularly low internal consistency for subtraction-based scores ( SB ≤ 0.36). Age was not a significant moderator of split-half relationships, indicating similar internal consistency across late childhood to early adolescence.

CONCLUSIONS: Within the same subjects, high internal consistency was observed for both ERP and fMRI measures of response to gains and losses, which did not vary as a function of age. Moreover, excellent psychometric properties were evident even within the first half of the experiment. Difference scores were characterized by lower internal consistency, although regression-based approaches outperformed subtraction-based difference scores.