Beyond ERPs: oscillatory neuronal dynamics.

The event-related potential (ERP) approach has provided a wealth of fine-grained information about the time course and the neural basis of cognitive processing events. However, in the 1980s and 1990s, an increasing number of researchers began to realize that an ERP only represents a certain part of the event-related electroencephalographic (EEG) signal. This chapter focuses on another aspect of event-related EEG activity: oscillatory EEG activity. There exists a meaningful relationship between oscillatory neuronal dynamics, on the one hand, and a wide range of cognitive processes, on the other hand. Given that the analysis of oscillatory dynamics extracts information from the EEG/magnetoencephalographic (EEG/MEG) signal that is largely lost with the traditional time-locked averaging of single trials used in the ERP approach, studying the dynamic oscillatory patterns in the EEG/MEG is at least a useful addition to the traditional ERP approach.