A comment on ‘ A fast L p spike alignment metric ’ by A .

Measuring the transmitted information in metric-based clustering has become something of a standard test for the performance of a spike train metric. In this comment, the recently proposed Lp VictorPurpura metric is used to cluster spiking responses to zebra finch songs, recorded from field L of anesthetized zebra finch. It is found that for these data the Lp metrics with p > 1 modestly outperform the standard, p = 1, Victor-Purpura metric. It is argued that this is because for larger values of p, the metric comes closer to performing windowed coincidence detection.