The reference-free CSD-PCA approach eliminates many of the pitfalls of volume-conducted scalp potentials (e.g., redundancy, reference-dependence), allowing one to more fully exploit the available temporal resolution, and to more efficiently characterize the neuroanatomical origins of brain activity associated with successive stages of information processing. This is an important advantage over other neuroimaging methods that rely on slow measures only indirectly related to neuronal activity. CSD is not merely a conservative bridge without the additional assumptions imposed by standard inverse solutions, it often provides a more appropriate description of neuroanatomical current generators underlying the potentials recorded from the scalp surface (Tenke et al., 2010).
