Pascual-Marqui, Kochi, Kinoshita: Lagged coherence: explicit and testable definition; arXiv 2023-11-24; https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2311.14356

Measures of association between cortical regions based on activity signals provide useful information for studying brain functional connectivity. Difficulties occur with signals of electric neuronal activity, where an observed signal is a mixture, i.e. an instantaneous weighted average of the true, unobserved signals from all regions, due to volume conduction and low spatial resolution. This is why measures of lagged association are of interest, since at least theoretically, “lagged association” is of physiological origin. In contrast, the actual physiological instantaneous zero-lag association is masked and confounded by the mixing artifact. A minimum requirement for a measure of lagged association is that it must not tend to zero with an increase of strength of true instantaneous physiological association. Such biased measures cannot tell apart if a change in its value is due to a change in lagged or a change in instantaneous association. An explicit testable definition for frequency domain lagged connectivity between two multivariate time series is proposed. It is endowed with two important properties: it is invariant to non-singular linear transformations of each vector time series separately, and it is invariant to instantaneous association. As a sanity check, in the case of two univariate time series, the new definition leads back to the bivariate lagged coherence of 2007 (eqs 25 and 26 in https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.0706.1776).

María Melcón, Enrique Stern, Dominique Kessel, Lydia Arana, Claudia Poch, Pablo Campo, Almudena Capilla:
Perception of near-threshold visual stimuli is influenced by pre-stimulus alpha-band amplitude but not by alpha phase (2023-03-14)
bioRxiv 2023.03.14.532551; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.03.14.532551

"...Our results show a clear effect of pre-stimulus alpha amplitude on conscious perception, but only when alpha fluctuated spontaneously and was not modulated by attention, supporting the notion that alpha-band power indexes neural excitability. In contrast, we did not find any evidence that pre-stimulus alpha phase influences the perceptual outcome, not even when differentiating between low and high amplitude trials. Furthermore, Bayesian analysis provided moderate evidence in favor of the absence of phase effects. Taken together, our results challenge the central theoretical predictions of the pulsed-inhibition framework, at least for the particular experimental conditions used here."