DOI 10.1007/s10827-011-0374-4 Improved measures of phase-coupling between spikes and the Local Field Potential

© The Author(s) 2011. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract An important tool to study rhythmic neu-ronal synchronization is provided by relating spiking activity to the Local Field Potential (LFP). Two types of interdependent spike-LFP measures exist. The first approach is to directly quantify the consistency of single spike-LFP phases across spikes, referred to here as point-field phase synchronization measures. We show that conventional point-field phase synchronization measures are sensitive not only to the consistency of spike-LFP phases, but are also affected by statistical de-pendencies between spike-LFP phases, caused by e.g. non-Poissonian history-effects within spike trains such as bursting and refractoriness. To solve this problem, we develop a new pairwise measure that is not biased by the number of spikes and not affected by statistical dependencies between spike-LFP phases. The second approach is to quantify, similar to EEG-EEG coher-ence, the consistency of the relative phase between spike train and LFP signals across trials instead of across spikes, referred to here as spike train to fiel