Definition
Neuronal firing rate is defined as the frequency at which a neuron discharges short-duration electrical pulses called firings or spikes, measured as number of spikes per second [sp/s] or hertz [Hz]. Because the duration of each electrical discharge is typically much shorter than interspike intervals, a spike is often idealized as a point event on the time axis. The temporal occurrence of neuronal spikes is irregular and nonreproducible even under identical stimuli. In principle, such randomness can be removed by collecting a huge number of spike trains from repeated trials and constructing a histogram of arbitrarily fine resolution for the superimposed data. However, in practice, experiments are conducted with a small number of trials over short periods during which neuronal conditions may not alter significantly. To obtain reasonable estimates from limited number of data,...
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Shinomoto, S. (2014). Estimation of Neuronal Firing Rate. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_392-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_392-5
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