Spike Count Correlation Increases with Length of Time Interval in the Presence of Trial-to-Trial Variation

It has been observed that spike count correlation between two simultaneously recorded neurons often increases with the length of time interval examined. Under simple assumptions that are roughly consistent with much experimental data, we show that this phenomenon may be explained as being due to excess trial-to-trial variation. The resulting formula for the correlation is able to predict the observed correlation of two neurons recorded from primary visual cortex as a function of interval length.

[1]  Carlos D. Brody,et al.  Disambiguating Different Covariation Types , 1999, Neural Computation.

[2]  Daeyeol Lee,et al.  Neural Noise and Movement-Related Codes in the Macaque Supplementary Motor Area , 2003, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[3]  Ehud Zohary,et al.  Correlated neuronal discharge rate and its implications for psychophysical performance , 1994, Nature.

[4]  R N Lemon,et al.  Synchronization in monkey motor cortex during a precision grip task. I. Task-dependent modulation in single-unit synchrony. , 2001, Journal of neurophysiology.

[5]  F. Mechler,et al.  Neural coding of spatial phase in V1 of the macaque monkey. , 2003, Journal of neurophysiology.

[6]  F. Mechler,et al.  Independent and Redundant Information in Nearby Cortical Neurons , 2001, Science.

[7]  J. Schall,et al.  Neural Control of Voluntary Movement Initiation , 1996, Science.

[8]  W. Newsome,et al.  The Variable Discharge of Cortical Neurons: Implications for Connectivity, Computation, and Information Coding , 1998, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[9]  Carlos D. Brody,et al.  Correlations Without Synchrony , 1999, Neural Computation.

[10]  C. Gray,et al.  Cellular Mechanisms Contributing to Response Variability of Cortical Neurons In Vivo , 1999, The Journal of Neuroscience.

[11]  Hagai Bergman,et al.  Trial to trial variability in either stimulus or action causes apparent correlation and synchrony in neuronal activity , 2001, Journal of Neuroscience Methods.

[12]  Sonja Grün,et al.  Effect of cross-trial nonstationarity on joint-spike events , 2003, Biological Cybernetics.

[13]  Robert E Kass,et al.  Trial-to-trial variability and its effect on time-varying dependency between two neurons. , 2005, Journal of neurophysiology.