Abstract
Recently there has been a strong interest in cross-frequency coupling, the interaction between neuronal oscillations in different frequency bands. In particular, measures quantifying the coupling between the phase of slow oscillations and the amplitude of fast oscillations have been applied to a wide range of data recorded from animals and humans. Some of the measures applied to detect phase-amplitude coupling have been criticized for being sensitive to nonsinusoidal properties of the oscillations and thus spuriously indicate the presence of coupling. While such instances of spurious identification of coupling have been observed, in this commentary we give concrete examples illustrating cases when the identification of cross-frequency coupling can be trusted. These examples are based on control analyses and empirical observations rather than signal-processing tools. Finally, we provide concrete advice on how to determine when measures of phase-amplitude coupling can be considered trustworthy.
Footnotes
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
This research was supported by James S. McDonnell Foundation Understanding Human Cognition Collaborative Award 220020448.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.
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- Significance Statement
- Detecting phase-amplitude coupling
- The problem: spurious identification PAC coupling
- How are nonsinusoidal oscillations generated?
- Three examples of reliable phase-to-amplitude coupling
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