Spike Count Reliability and the Poisson Hypothesis Export

@article{citeulike:525381, abstract = {The variability of cortical activity in response to repeated presentations of a stimulus has been an area of controversy in the ongoing debate regarding the evidence for fine temporal structure in nervous system activity. We present a new statistical technique for assessing the significance of observed variability in the neural spike counts with respect to a minimal Poisson hypothesis, which avoids the conventional but troubling assumption that the spiking process is identically distributed across trials. We apply the method to recordings of inferotemporal cortical neurons of primates presented with complex visual stimuli. On this data, the minimal Poisson hypothesis is rejected: the neuronal responses are too reliable to be fit by a typical firing-rate model, even allowing for sudden, time-varying, and trial-dependent rate changes after stimulus onset. The statistical evidence favors a tightly regulated stimulus response in these neurons, close to stimulus onset, although not further away. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2948-05.2006}, address = {Division of Applied Mathematics, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA. asohan@dam.brown.edu}, author = {Amarasingham, Asohan and Chen, Ting-Li and Geman, Stuart and Harrison, Matthew T. and Sheinberg, David L.}, citeulike-article-id = {525381}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2948-05.2006}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/3/801}, citeulike-linkout-2 = {http://view.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16421300}, citeulike-linkout-3 = {http://www.hubmed.org/display.cgi?uids=16421300}, day = {18}, doi = {10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2948-05.2006}, issn = {1529-2401}, journal = {J. Neurosci.}, keywords = {cortex, poisson, reliability, variability}, month = {January}, number = {3}, pages = {801--809}, posted-at = {2007-09-26 16:43:52}, priority = {2}, title = {Spike Count Reliability and the Poisson Hypothesis}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2948-05.2006}, volume = {26}, year = {2006} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:525381 L3 - citeulike-article-id:525381 N2 - The variability of cortical activity in response to repeated presentations of a stimulus has been an area of controversy in the ongoing debate regarding the evidence for fine temporal structure in nervous system activity. We present a new statistical technique for assessing the significance of observed variability in the neural spike counts with respect to a minimal Poisson hypothesis, which avoids the conventional but troubling assumption that the spiking process is identically distributed across trials. We apply the method to recordings of inferotemporal cortical neurons of primates presented with complex visual stimuli. On this data, the minimal Poisson hypothesis is rejected: the neuronal responses are too reliable to be fit by a typical firing-rate model, even allowing for sudden, time-varying, and trial-dependent rate changes after stimulus onset. The statistical evidence favors a tightly regulated stimulus response in these neurons, close to stimulus onset, although not further away. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2948-05.2006 IS - 3 JF - J. Neurosci. SN - 1529-2401 AD - Division of Applied Mathematics, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA. asohan@dam.brown.edu EP - 809 TI - Spike Count Reliability and the Poisson Hypothesis VL - 26 SP - 801 KW - cortex KW - poisson KW - reliability KW - variability AU - Amarasingham, Asohan AU - Chen, Ting-Li AU - Geman, Stuart AU - Harrison, Matthew AU - Sheinberg, David PY - 2006/01/18/ UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2948-05.2006 ER -