POSTER PRESENTATION Open Access Time-resolved and parameter-free measures of spike train synchrony: properties and applications

The relevance of exact spike timings in neural coding was presumed since a long time and has now been experimentally established, see e.g. in [1,2]. A popular approach to the analysis of spike timings is to measure the synchrony of spike trains. With the recent advance-ments of the experimental techniques, it is now possible to simultaneously record the activity of hundreds of neurons. The analysis of such collective responses requires new mathematical tools that are able to detect synchrony in groups of spike trains. Here, we present three methods to quantify spike train synchrony that are applicable in such multivariate situations. All of these methods are parameter-free and time-resolved which makes them easy to handle and able to detect temporal changes of synchrony