RANDOMIZATION TESTS - APPLICATION TO SINGLE-CELL AND OTHER SINGLE-UNIT NEUROSCIENCE EXPERIMENTS

The application of randomization tests for statistical determination o f the significance of experimental manipulations on single cells and o ther types of single units in neuroscience is described. Applications of standard parametric tests like analysis of variance (ANOVA) and t t ests to data from single-subject experiments have been severely critic ized for lack of validity and those criticisms are relevant to paramet ric statistical tests for data from other types of single-unit experim ents. A broad class of statistical tests known as randomization tests, on the other hand, has been free of such criticism. Randomization tes ts have been applied to data from various types of single units in neu roscience, where their validity in the absence of random sampling make s them especially valuable. Until the advent of computers, the computa tional requirements of randomization tests rendered them impractical. Randomization test computer programs are now readily available. Proced ures for access to a public domain program are given in the text.