Hi everyone, we’re planning to use the Duration Discrimination Respiratory Task in an upcoming study and are basing our procedure on the approach described by Bodart et al. (2024, Psychophysiology, 61[10], e14632; https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14632). As far as we can tell, this is the only published study so far that has applied the task in this form.

In their method, a 2-minute baseline is used to determine average inhalation and exhalation durations. These are calculated by placing event markers at the minima and maxima of each respiratory cycle:

• Inhalation time = max point – min point
• Exhalation time = next min point – max point
• Reference values = mean of all inhalation and exhalation times during the baseline

On average, they used ~25 breathing cycles (SD ~6) for these calculations.

We’re wondering: Is a 2-minute baseline sufficient to obtain reliable individual reference values for inhale and exhale durations in this kind of task?

We’d really appreciate any feedback or shared experience – even from related work with respiratory timing or psychophysiological baselines more broadly. Thanks so much!