Inter-trial coherence (ITC) can be used to assess the extent to which EEG oscillations become phase aligned following feedback. Thus, ITC reflects the extent to which a specific task event (e.g., stimulus or response) generates changes in phase synchrony (or induces phase re-setting) of ongoing oscillations across frequency spectra. Analogous to a correlation coefficient, ITC values refer to the degree of association across trials, ranging from zero to one. ITC allows for the assessment of millisecond-to-millisecond fluctuations in partial phase synchrony induced by experimental events, independent of changes in EEG power (Makeig et al., 2004). ITC is assessed at a single location or region and thus reflects “temporal coherence,” to be distinguished from “spatial coherence” assessed across brain regions.
