Interplay of electroencephalogram phase and auditory-evoked neural activity

Auditory-evoked potentials (AEPs) were triggered in real time as a function of ongoing electroencephalogram (EEG) phase. Phase triggering on-line or retrospective phase-selective averaging introduces phase artifacts such as spurious troughs or peaks, which mask mid-latency and affect the amplitude of late AEPs. We developed a method to control for phase artifacts by phase-selective averaging of trials, recorded without stimulation, and used this to uncover a previously unknown phase dependency of AEPs. Not only are such findings inconsistent with the standard additive evoked potential model, but we identified clear neural correlates at fixed latencies, which are inconsistent with the recently proposed phase-resetting model. Our findings suggest that a new conceptualization is required to account for the interplay between the correlates of neural-evoked activity and modulation of ongoing EEG that together constitute evoked potentials.