title: Sensitivity of different stimulus-timing strategies for the detection of small excitations in noisy spike train data.
abstract: There are several different strategies to control the timing of a stimulus with respect to the ongoing discharge during the recording of neuronal stimulus-response characteristics. One possible strategy consists of delivering stimuli in such a way that a constant pre-stimulus spike density is reached. Another strategy enforces spike application with a constant stimulus latency after a spontaneous discharge. In this paper the sensitivity of these different strategies for statistical verification of small excitatory response components was investigated. It was found that the difference between observed post-stimulus spike distribution and expected spike distribution under the null hypothesis of no stimulus effect was larger using a constant-stimulus-latency (CSL) strategy with an appropriate value for the stimulus latency. Thus, the statistical verification of neuronal response components is clearly facilitated if a CSL strategy is used. This superiority of the CSL strategy is marked, especially for small excitations at neurons discharging slowly with low discharge variability.
authors.affiliation: Medizinische Hochschule Hannover, Germany.
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Awiszus
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D003491:Cybernetics; D004558:Electric Stimulation; D004594:Electrophysiology; D006801:Humans; D009046:Motor Neurons / Q000502:physiology; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*