Strengths and limitations

The main strengths for EEG are its good temporal resolution, accessibility, and non-invasiveness (for scalp EEG). For people doing EEG-based projects, the main draw should be the use of temporal resolution (e.g, measuring latency in responses or waveforms, in relation to brain activity). However, there are quite a few relevant limitations to EEG; those being its spatial resolution and noise. Spatial resolution refers to our ability to localize activity from the brain. If temporal resolution is the “when”, then spatial resolution is the “where”. The other drawback is noise. Since EEG is picking up electrical activity from our brain, you can imagine all the other kinds of background electrical that can contaminate your data. For example, the most obvious would be the 60Hz line noise if you are in the US. Knowing this, there are several ways to clean up your data, which we will explain in later articles or in the suggestions for further reading.