[Eeglablist] Prestimulus alpha power, inter-stimulus interval jitter

[Paul Steinfath]

Dear all,

I have an experiment where I want to probe two components of working 
memory (updating representations vs. maintaining them in a 
distractor-restistant way)
I have a task which is desinged to probe these two mechanisms

I want to know what is the relation between pre-stimulus alpha power and 
task performance (per condition)

currently the inter-stimulus interval is jittered (2-6 secs)

would you recomment to get rid of the jitter?

There are some papers, where they also use a jitter arguing:
'Temporal jitter between stimuli was used (Luck, 2005) to reduce the 
distortion that results from overlapping neural activity between 
previous and subsequent stimuli'

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4705233/
or
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4044240/

but doesn't a jitter introduce variability? I would expect alpha power 
to go up when then ITI is longer

Curious to hear your opinions on this.

Best,
Paul