APPLICATIONS OF THE SPIKE DENSITY-FUNCTION IN ANALYSIS OF NEURONAL FIRING PATTERNS

Firing rate histogram is a widely used mathematical method for represe nting the activity of single neurons and small neural networks. Nevert heless, observation of fine temporal modulation or correlations of spi ke trains might be troublesome if the mean firing rate is low or rapid local changes occur. The spike density function (SDF) obtained by con volving the spike train with smooth and continuous kernel function pro ves to be a more appropriate approach in characterization of the firin g pattern. The resulting time-function is a continuous and derivable o ne, thus it can be used as a dynamical variable of the neuronal activi ty. In the present paper applications of SDF in analysis of the firing patterns of Lymnaea neurons are described and its performance is comp ared to other quantitative methods. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.