The aim of this work was to establish whether those with ASD show greater variability across single-trial evoked EEG compared with neuro-typical individuals. A second aim was to compare single-trial EEG variability when extracted from spatially filtered data and from raw-scalp EEG data in order to select the most appropriate variables for group comparison. All three measures of peak variability – P1 amplitude, P1 latency, and maximum α-band phase coherence – were smaller when analyzed from the spatially filtered data than from the scalp EEG data, highlighting the benefits of applying spatial filtering techniques to EEG. Having validated the use of CSD and ICA in this study, measures of single-trial variability were compared between the participants with and without ASD, with the finding that intra-participant variability was significantly greater in the participants with ASD than in the control group.
