Recording site dependence of the neuronal spiking statistics

Spiking characteristics of neurons in the middle temporal (MT) area and the medial superior temporal (MST) area in the visual cortex of a monkey are compared with the ones in the principal sulcus (PS) area in the prefrontal cortex. The comparison is based on the basis of three inter-spike interval statistical measures: the coefficient of variation (CV), the skewness coefficient (SK) and the correlation coefficient of consecutive intervals (COR). Even for the spike sequences recorded from the same neuron, three coefficients computed from 100 intervals do not always exhibit similar values, but distribute rather widely. The distribution of three coefficients obtained from a single neuron in the MST area does not largely deviate from the distribution obtained from multiple neurons in MT and MST areas. Those distributions, however, largely deviate from the distribution obtained from neurons in the PS area. In this way, the distribution of those statistical coefficients reflects the nature of the recording site.