Estimation of the power spectrum is a common method for identifying oscillatory changes in neuronal activity. However, the stochastic nature of neuronal activity leads to severe biases in the estimation of these oscillations in single unit spike trains. Different biological and experimental factors cause the spike train to differentially reflect its underlying oscillatory rate function. We anal...

In the reverse correlation method [1] to neural encoding, the neural system is treated as a black box and both the input stimuli and output spike trains are assumed to be observable. Based on the correlation between the input and the output, the black box is identified as the kernel of a Wiener filter. When investigating problems arising in olfactory coding, an explicit characterization of odor...

Experimental data have shown that synapses are heterogeneous: different synapses respond with different sequences of amplitudes of postsynaptic responses to the same spike train. Neither the role of synaptic dynamics itself nor the role of the heterogeneity of synaptic dynamics for computations in neural circuits is well understood. We present in this article two computational methods that make...

Repetitive spatio-temporal propagation patterns are encountered in fields as wide-ranging as climatology, social communication and network science. In neuroscience, perfectly consistent repetitions of the same global propagation pattern are called a synfire pattern. For any recording of sequences of discrete events (in neuroscience terminology: sets of spike trains) the questions arise how clos...

A novel feedback-based spike detection algorithm for noisy spike trains is presented in this paper. It uses the information extracted from the results of spike classification for the enhancement of spike detection. The algorithm performs template matching for spike detection by a normalized correlator. The detected spikes are then sorted by the OSortalgorithm. The mean of spikes of each cluster...

We address the problem of learning temporally precise spike train to spike train transformations in multilayer feedforward networks of spiking neurons. We pursue a framework based strictly on spike timing, that is, one that avoids invoking concepts pertaining to spike rates. The proposed error functional compares the spike train emitted by the output neuron of the network to the desired spike t...

Fast spike correlation is a signature of neural ensemble activity thought to underlie perception, cognition, and action. To relate spike correlation to tuning and other factors, we focused on spontaneous activity because it is the common 'baseline' across studies that test different stimuli, and because variations in correlation strength are much larger across cell pairs than across stimuli. Is...

The retina’s visual message is transmitted to the brain by ganglion cells that integrate noisy synaptic inputs to create a spike train. We asked how efficiently the retinal ganglion cell spike generator creates the spike train message. Intracellular and extracellular recordings were made from in vitro guinea pig retina, in response to a spot of light flashed over the receptive field center. Res...