Clinical and basic EEG research relish a remarkable, almost century long, history of scientific success that has generated a vast number of breakthrough findings in many areas using surface potentials. Although the overwhelming majority of electrophysiologists appears to be cognizant of the reference problem, the direct implications of this dependency for EEG data analysis have been underestimated or dismissed. It is generally presumed that simply by applying the same EEG reference (e.g., average or linked-mastoids), whatever its specific problems or disadvantages, the data at hand are treated equally and all group- and/or condition-differences can be attributed to the experimental manipulation, which, if smartly designed, will warrant factual and accurate interpretation of findings. However, these presumptions are deceiving, as exemplified by Figures 2 and 3 and generalized by the schematics shown in Figure 14.
