A method for quantifying temporal and spatial patterns of spike trains

Abstract

Spike trains are treated as exact time dependent stepwise functions called response functions. Five variables defined at sequential moments with equal interval are introduced to characterize features of response function; and these features can reflect temporal patterns of spike train. These variables have obvious geometric meaning in expressing the response and reasonable coding meaning in describing spike train since the well known 'firing rate' is among them. The dissimilarity or distance between spike trains can be simply defined by means of these variables. The reconstruction of spike train with these variables demonstrates that information carried by spikes is preserved. If spikes of neuron ensemble are taken as a spatial sequence in each time bins, spatial patterns of spikes can also be quantified with a group of variables similar to temporal ones. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.