Spike trains and local field potentials (LFPs) resulting from extracellular current flows provide a substrate for neural information processing. Understanding the neural code from simultaneous spike-field recordings and subsequent decoding of information processing events will have widespread applications. One way to demonstrate an understanding of the neural code, with particular advantages fo...

This dissertation introduces new methodologies for the analysis of neural spike trains. Biological properties of the nervous system, and how they are reflected in neural data, can motivate specific analytic tools. Some of these biological aspects motivate multiscale frameworks, which allow for simultaneous modelling of the local and global behaviour of neurons. Chapter 1 provides the preliminar...

Spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) has attracted considerable experimental and theoretical attention over the last decade. In the most basic formulation, STDP provides a fundamental unit - a spike pair - for quantifying the induction of long-term changes in synaptic strength. However, many factors, both pre- and postsynaptic, can affect synaptic transmission and integration, especially wh...

The correlation structure of neural activity is believed to play a major role in the encoding and possibly the decoding of information in neural populations. Recently, several methods were developed for exactly controlling the correlation structure of multi-channel synthetic spike trains (Brette, 2009; Krumin and Shoham, 2009; Macke et al., 2009; Gutnisky and Josic, 2010; Tchumatchenko et al., ...

We consider a spike-generating stationary Markov process whose transition probabilities are known. We show that there is a canonical potential whose Gibbs distribution, obtained from the Maximum Entropy Principle (MaxEnt), is the equilibrium distribution of this process. We provide a method to compute explicitly and exactly this potential as a linear combination of spatio-temporal interactions....

Several authors have previously discussed the use of log-linear models, often called maximum entropy models, for analyzing spike train data to detect synchrony. The usual log-linear modeling techniques, however, do not allow time-varying firing rates that typically appear in stimulus-driven (or action-driven) neurons, nor do they incorporate non-Poisson history effects or covariate effects. We ...

Understanding how stimulus information is encoded in spike trains is a central problem in computational neuroscience. Decoding methods provide an important tool for addressing this problem, by allowing us to explicitly read out the information contained in spike responses. Here we introduce several decoding methods based on point-process neural encoding models (i.e. “forward” models that predic...

The reliability of spike trains generated by sinusoidal current injections in prefrontal cortical pyramidal cells and interneurons depends strongly on the input frequency. We constructed computational models in order to study how cellular properties affect reliability. The models reproduced the main experimental findings: subthreshold oscillations, resonance and reliability of spike timing. The...

Volleyball players are at high risk of overuse shoulder injuries, with spike biomechanics a perceived risk factor. This study compared spike kinematics between elite male volleyball players with and without a history of shoulder injuries. Height, mass, maximum jump height, passive shoulder rotation range of motion (ROM), and active trunk ROM were collected on elite players with (13) and without...

In order to evaluate the importance of higher-order correlations in neural spike count codes, flexible statistical models of dependent multivariate spike counts are required. Copula families, parametric multivariate distributions that represent dependencies, can be applied to construct such models. We introduce the Frank mixture family as a new copula family that has separate parameters for all...