Filter phase delay´s share in the estimated phase delay

The electrical activity of neurons contains information about certain variables in the internal and external environments of the organism. One of the methods that are used for estimating such information from neural activity recordings is the point process recursive filter. Here, the effects of this filter´s phase delay are examined in a neuroscientifically realistic simulated experiment. The results show that the filter´s phase delay has a physiologically relevant magnitude. It is shown that the phase delay decreases and asymptotically reaches zero as the filter equations converge to maximum likelihood estimation.