MOVE

Event-related brain dynamics: being complex is simple

There is considerable controversy as to how to distinguish and quantify different types of Event Related Brain Dynamics (ERBD) examples being phase locked, induced, and partial phase reset activity. Several measures have been proposed (e.g. Inter trial phase coherence) that operate on the clouds of complex numbers arising from time/frequency decomposi-tions of repeated trials. Our group has recently argued (Statistics in Medicine, 27: 2922-2947) that these measures carry out premature extraction of magnitudes and phases, are flawed, and confound different types of ERBD. Much simpler interpretations follow from carrying out statistical tests on the complex numbers themselves. Here we extend these tests to the multivariate case and to inter frequency relations.