Ocular artifacts in children's EEG: selection is better than correction

The electroencephalogram (EEG) during middle childhood may be highly distorted by the occurrence of eye and head movement artifacts. Between 5 and 12 years children display a great number of such artifacts. In the present study we studied different methods to assess EEG artifacts in children. Three artifact treatments were compared with the uncorrected EEG: one widely used method which corrected the EEG for electrooculogram (EOG) EEG transfer and two methods which selected artifact-free EEG segments. The most effective method should selectively reduce the spectral power in the lower frequency bands and at the frontal regions which are most susceptible to eye artifacts. The results demonstrated that the selection procedure, which combined two criteria for the selection of artifact-free EEG segments, was superior. The procedure that corrected the EEG for EOG-EEG transfer unselectively removed spectral power across the whole scalp and across all frequency bands. Furthermore, part of the maturational change in frontal Alpha power was filtered out by the correction procedure. It was concluded that for the background EEG in children, it is better to carefully select artifact-free EEG segments than to correct for EOG-EEG transfer.