Another significant advantage of the methods used here is that they are robust to potential outliers at the single-trial level. During standard trial averaging, trials are not typically inspected for outliers, and it is thus possible that a minority of trials with large oscillation power values bias the average activity levels. In contrast, robust regression minimizes the contribution of outliers, and the phase modulation analyses are based on permutation testing, therefore minimizing the danger of outliers biasing estimates of trial-averaged results.
