Analysis of Parallel Spike Trains

This volume has been put together by Grun (RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Japan) and Rotter (biology and computational neuroscience, Albert-Ludwig U., Germany) under the assumption that following the move from study of single neuron activity to the study of neuronal spike trains, analysis of simultaneously recorded, parallel neuronal spike trains is the logical next research step for understanding the neuronal mechanisms underlying information processing in the brain, because it is necessary to understand the variable and context-dependent coalitions among neurons and groups of neurons. They present a textbook on the analysis of parallel spike trains that focuses on concepts and methods of correlation analysis such as synchrony, patterns, and rate covariance, but also includes an introduction to approaches for single spike trains. They pay considerable attention to the underlying theoretical assumptions of the various methods and also describe stochastic modeling tools and numerical methods for testing if the analysis method chosen serves the intended purpose. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)