METER: Matched-Event Calibration for Short-Event EEG Microstate Transition Analysis

Abstract

Short cognitive events contain unequal and often sparse transition evidence, so raw EEG microstate distances can reflect finite sampling rather than neural reconfiguration. We introduce METER (Matched-Event Transition Estimation against a Reference), a participant-relative framework that separates marginal occupancy from conditional next-state choice and evaluates each event against duration-conditioned events from a fixed participant-specific reference bank. METER-Jump integrates uncertainty in sparse target and reference transition tables, returning a randomized event rank for testing and a continuous standardized coordinate for association analysis. Using a reproducible three-state representation selected by spatial criteria, we evaluated METER with participant-fitted simulations, estimator ablations, map perturbations, and preprocessing sensitivities. Event-level false-positive rates were 0.044-0.056 across four heterogeneous null mechanisms. By contrast, global cutoffs learned under the participant-fitted null and transferred unchanged to other regimes produced false-positive rates from 0.004 under rare transitions to 0.234 under map perturbation; duration-conditioned ranks remained near 0.05. Detection probability was approximately 0.69 with fixed maps but fell to 0.22 after bootstrap-derived map-assignment perturbation. In 4,175 natural-reading events from 18 participants, no linguistic association survived multiplicity correction in the primary 30-ms analysis, although a 20-ms sensitivity changed one within-stream max-$T$ decision. METER therefore calibrates finite-event departures conditional on a defined microstate sequence, while map assignment, filtering, temporal smoothing, and reference construction remain separate sources of measurement uncertainty.