ABSTRACT
When a neuron is effectively stimulated by its inputs, it responds by increasing or decreasing its ring rate. For many students of neural coding, these global changes in the output of a neuron, measured as the spike count over a dened response interval, are a sufcient description of how a stimulus is represented by the nervous system. Some incorporate the spike counts observed across the population of neurons in a given structure or system, or some sample thereof, into neural coding theories, but the basic unit of data is nearly always the same (see Di Lorenzo and Lemon, 2001). More recently, investigators have focused on the dynamics of evoked spike trains as a potential means of communication among neurons. In both sensory and motor systems, it has been shown that various temporal characteristics of neural responses may be just as, if not more, informative as spike count.
