A program for sampling, assessment of stationarity and variability analysis of neuronal spike trains, run under...

A system has been developed for off-line analysis of discharge characteristics of continuously firing nerve cells. The programs, which are mainly written in FORTRAN IV, determine mean firing rates, variability and other parameters of the impulse activity, and construct interspike interval histograms. They are run under time-sharing on a small laboratory computer. To disclose possible non-stationarities in the data all interspike interval samples are analysed with the non-parametric Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. This test is very powerful in detecting any differences between two samples and is still very easy to implement in programming. Raw data and computed statistics are stored in random access data files.