Understanding spike-triggered covariance using Wiener theory for receptive field identification.

ABSTRACT: Receptive field identification is a vital problem in sensory neurophysiology and vision. Much research has been done in identifying the receptive fields of nonlinear neurons whose firing rate is determined by the nonlinear interactions of a small number of linear filters. Despite more advanced methods that have been proposed, spike-triggered covariance (STC) continues to be the most widely used method in such situations due to its simplicity and intuitiveness. Although the connection between STC and Wiener/Volterra kernels has often been mentioned in the literature, this relationship has never been explicitly derived. Here we derive this relationship and show that the STC matrix is actually a modified version of the second-order Wiener kernel, which incorporates the input autocorrelation a

SUBMITTER: Sandler RA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4525694 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature