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The Journal of Neuroscience, January 18, 2006, 26(3):801-809; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2948-05.2006

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Spike Count Reliability and the Poisson Hypothesis

Asohan Amarasingham,¹ Ting-Li Chen,¹ Stuart Geman,¹ Matthew T. Harrison,¹ and David L. Sheinberg²

¹Division of Applied Mathematics, and² Department of Neuroscience, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912

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.

Key words: inferotemporal cortex; spike trains; temporal coding; spike train analysis; trial-to-trial variability; regularity; Poisson hypothesis test; non-Poisson spiking; vision; object recognition

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Received May. 19, 2005; revised Nov. 18, 2005; accepted Nov. 19, 2005.

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