Cerebral rhythms and temporal coherence

Some studies of scalp-conducted human EEG show a positive correlation between the temporal coherence of prestimulus activity in the theta, alpha, and beta passbands, on the one hand, and both target probability and subjective self-report about good performance, on the other. There remains an important ambiguity in these data: Are these changes in temporal coherence merely a reflection of changes in subjective relaxation, or do they index the timing of neural network convergences to terminal attractors? Other studies of human EEG during temporal conditioning paradigms suggest that the second alternative can be rigorously tested.