Peristimulus time histogram

Peristimulus time histogram (also known as poststimulus time histogram and perievent time histogram) is a histogram that visualizes the instantaneous rate of neuronal spike discharges responding to an external stimulus or event.

In this method, a spike train recorded from a single neuron is aligned with the onset of an identical stimulus repeatedly applied to an animal. The aligned sequences are superimposed in time, and then used to construct a histogram.

Construction procedure

 * 1) Align spike sequences with the onset of stimuli that repeated n times.
 * 2) Divide the observation period T into N bins of size $$\Delta$$.
 * 3) Count the number of spikes ki from all n sequences that enter i-th bin.
 * 4) Draw a (bar-graph) histogram with the bar-height of the i-th bin given by $$k_i / n \Delta$$