Inter-spike interval statistics of cortical neurons

Abstract

There has been an on-going controversy on whether the standard neuro-spiking models can reproduce the spiking statistics of cortical neurons. The past discussions have focused solely on spiking irregularity and many issues remain unsettled. We attempt here to solve the problem by taking account of three kinds of spiking statistics: the coefficient of variation and the skewness coefficient of inter-spike intervals, and the correlation coefficients of the consecutive inter-spiko intervals. It was found that the standard neuro-spiking models incorporating the assumption of temporally uncorrelated inputs are not able to account for the spiking data recorded from a monkey prefrontal cortex.