A novel spike distance

Abstract

The discrimination between two spike trains is a fundamental problem, both for the experimentalist and for the nervous system itself. We introduce a measure for the distance between two spike trains. The distance has a time constant as a parameter. Depending on this parameter, the distance interpolates between a coincidence detector and a rate difference counter. The dependence of the distance on noise is studied with an integrate and fire model. For an intermediate range of the time constants, the distance depends linearly on the noise. This property can be used to determine the intrinsic noise of a neuron.