Neuronal assemblies: Searching for their signature in spiking activity (A non-parametric significance estimation approach)

The assembly hypothesis suggests that information processing in the cortex is mediated by groups of neurons by their coordinated spiking activity. Thus, the unitary events analysis (Grün et al (2002)) was designed to detect the presence of conspicuous spike coincidences in multiple single unit recordings and to evaluate their statistical significance. The method assumes spike trains as Poisson processes to realize the null-hypothesis of independent processes leading to a parametric significance estimation. Since experimental data often violates the assumption of an Poisson processes I will present you a non-parametric significance test based on the method of combined shuffling and resampling ('CSR'; Pipa & Grün (2002)). The CSR method considers the original temporal structure of the experimental spike trains and do not assume a special underlying spike train generating stochastic process.