A closed-form solution for removing the dead time effects from the poststimulus time histograms

Abstract

Discharge patterns from cochlear nerve fibers contain important information about acoustic stimuli and encoding schemes of the peripheral auditory system. Yet these patterns are distorted due to refractory or dead time effects. By modeling discharges from peripheral auditory nerves as a self-exciting Poisson process, the effects of dead time on a poststimulus time histogram can be determined, assuming the recovery time does not depend on acoustic stimuli. If the recovery function is known, a closed-form formula is available to remove the dead time distortions from the poststimulus time histogram.