Attrition Rate in Infant fNIRS Research: A Meta-Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Understanding the trends and predictors of attrition rate, or the proportion of collected data that is excluded from the final analyses, is important for accurate research planning, assessing data integrity, and ensuring generalizability. In this pre-registered meta-analysis, we reviewed 182 publications in infant (0-24 months) functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) research published from 1998 to April 9, 2020 and investigated the trends and predictors of attrition. The average attrition rate was 34.23% among 272 experiments across all 182 publications. Among a subset of 136 experiments which reported the specific reasons of subject exclusion, 21.50% of the attrition were infant-driven while 14.21% were signal-driven. Subject characteristics (e.g., age) and study design (e.g., fNIRS cap configuration, block/trial design, and stimulus type) predicted the total and subject-driven attrition rates, suggesting that modifying the recruitment pool or the study design can meaningfully reduce the attrition rate in infant fNIRS research. Based on the findings, we established guidelines on reporting the attrition rate for scientific transparency and made recommendations to minimize the attrition rates. We also launched an attrition rate calculator ( LINK ) to aid with research planning. This research can facilitate developmental cognitive neuroscientists in their quest toward increasingly rigorous and representative research. Highlights Average attrition rate in infant fNIRS research is 34.23% 21.50% of the attrition are infant-driven (e.g., inattentiveness) while 14.21% are signal-driven (e.g., poor optical contact) Subject characteristics (e.g., age) and study design (e.g., fNIRS cap configuration, block/trial design, and stimulus type) predict the total and infant-driven attrition rates Modifying the recruitment pool or the study design can meaningfully reduce the attrition rate in infant fNIRS research
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".