Given the developing interest in cross-frequency coupling, it is vital for the wider neuroscience and electrophysiological community to understand the steps involved in its measurement and interpretation. This is especially important for PAC, which is beset with methodological pitfalls, since there are many competing algorithms, approaches, and currently no gold-standard set of analysis steps (Canolty and Knight, 2010; Jensen et al., 2016). It has also been suggested that numerous incidences of reported PAC may in fact be false positives, caused by suboptimal analysis practices and/or the presence of artifacts within the data (Aru et al., 2015; Hyafil, 2015). For example non-sinusoidal sawtooth-like oscillations can generate artificially inflated PAC values, via low-frequency phase harmonics (Lozano-Soldevilla et al., 2016; Cole et al., 2017; Vaz et al., 2017).
