ABSTRACT
The electrophysiological investigation of the visual system poses two major problems for systems analysis and identification. This chapter aims to illuminate the old subject of white-noise systems analysis from a different angle in the hope of generating some new insights. It also aims to communicate methods that have proven extremely useful in visual electrophysiology. The chapter makes a distinction between stochastic and deterministic techniques based on the way the response properties are extracted. In a stochastic approach the system is stimulated by means of a random process, and the extraction of the response characteristics is based on the stochastic properties of the stimulus. In a deterministic analysis, on the other hand, one uses the exact input signal. Because the deterministic approach makes it possible to keep track of the number of occurrences of each configuration, it can also be used with nonwhite inputs.
