Separating individual skin conductance responses in a short interstimulus-interval paradigm.
We describe a new method for measuring skin conductance responses, designed to overcome the problem of overlapping skin conductance responses. The method relies on the assumptions that the underlying sudomotor nerve signal has a shorter time-constant than the skin conductance signal itself, and that the sudomotor bursts arrive as discrete, separated events. By converting the skin conductance signal into a time-series with a shorter time-constant, we are able to extract the separated peaks in the estimated underlying driver signal. The separated driver peaks are then used to re-estimate each individual skin conductance response. The method is automated and applied to a normative database of 735 subjects, for which skin conductance was measured during an auditory oddball paradigm.
Alexander
D M
DM
Brain Resource Company, PO Box 737, Broadway, Sydney, 2007 NSW, Australia. dalex@brainresource.com
Trengove
C
C
Johnston
P
P
Cooper
T
T
August
J P
JP
Gordon
E
E
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000465:Algorithms; D002648:Child; D004594:Electrophysiology / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009482:Neurophysiology / Q000379:methods*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology*; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012867:Skin / Q000294:innervation; D012879:Skin Physiological Phenomena; D013545:Sweat Glands / Q000294:innervation / Q000502:physiology; D013997:Time Factors