Information about the time course of the stimulus waveform is increased at bifurcation points because of the presence of multiple spike patterns.

<p>Data from an example model neuron as described in <a href="http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002615#pcbi-1002615-g005" target="_blank">Figure 5</a>. (A) Rastergram for a short time segment across 100 trials for a (bottom) low-noise and (top) medium-noise model neuron. The noise level refers to the magnitude of a white noise current that varied from trial-to-trial relative to the amplitude of the repeated fluctuating current waveform (shown as a thin solid line on top of each rastergram). For low noise, the neuron spiked only at six events, whereas for medium noise there were additional events. (B) We calculated the reliability and jitter for each event for the entire stimulus duration (1100 ms). The open circles represent the low-noise, and the asterisks represent the medium-noise result. The gray-filled region schematically represents the combination of jitter and reliability for which a putative postsynaptic neuron would generate a spike. (C) The spike-triggered average obtained across the entire stimulus period for (solid line) the medium-noise neuron and (dotted line) the low-noise neuron. (D) The stimulus waveform reconstructed using the low-noise (dotted line) and medium-noise (solid line) spike trains was compared to the actual stimulus waveform (gray solid line). We used an event-based reconstruction, where each extracted event contributed equally to the reconstruction regardless of reliability and jitter, as long as the reliability exceeded 5%. The three curves are offset from each other for clarity.