ITC

Jackknife intertrial coherence and phase

In my last post, I gave a brief introduction to intertrial coherence, which is a measure of how consistent oscillatory phase is across an ensemble of trials. One thing I mentioned, right at the end, was that ITC is a compound, summary statistic that doesn’t in and of itself exist on a single-trial level. This has lead several people to think about how to link it to single trial behavioural measures such as reaction time.

What is intertrial coherence?

Intertrial coherence (ITC) is a measure of how consistent oscillatory phase is across an ensemble of trials. In the schematic below, we have a sine wave of an arbitrary frequency. The amplitude of the wave is the distance between 0 and the wave at a given timepoint. So here, you can see it has a maximum of 1, indicated by the arrow. A complete cycle of of the wave is the amplitude peaking, declining to a trough, then hitting zero again.