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Updated: Jul 31, 2026

A Procedure for Implanting Organized Arrays of Microwires for Single-unit Recordings in Awake, Behaving Animals
Published on: February 14, 2014
Mean instantaneous firing frequency is always higher than the firing rate
Petr Lánský1, Roger Rodriguez, Laura Sacerdote
1Institute of Physiology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 142-20 Prague 4, Czech Republic. lansky@biomed.cas.cz
Abstract:
Frequency coding is considered one of the most common coding strategies employed by neural systems. This fact leads, in experiments as well as theoretical studies, to construction of so-called transfer functions, where the output firing frequency is plotted against the input intensity. The term "firing frequency" can be understood differently in different contexts. Basically, it means that the number of spikes over an interval of preselected length is counted and then divided by the length of the interval, but due to the obvious limitations, the length of observation cannot be arbitrarily long. Then firing frequency is defined as reciprocal to the mean interspike interval. In parallel, an instantaneous firing frequency can be defined as reciprocal to the length of current interspike interval, and by taking a mean of these, the definition can be extended to introduce the mean instantaneous firing frequency. All of these definitions of firing frequency are compared in an effort to contribute to a better understanding of the input-output properties of a neuron.
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