Proposal of Synchronization Indexes of Single Neuron Activity on Periodic Stimulus

Synchronization of a neuronal response to a given periodic stimulus is usually measured by Goldberg and Brown´s vector strength metric (1969). The limitations of this index are discussed and two alternative indexes are proposed: the corrected vector strength index and the phase variance index. Using a standard data set, the three metrics are compared and the results indicate that the vector strength index should be interpreted with great care. The proposed new indexes are both more relevant to ´synchronization´. Moreover, these two indexes can be tuned to show a large variation of behavior depending on the user´s idea of synchronization.