How to run CURBD on neural spike data? What size time window for mean firing rates?

[lesheri2]

Hi Matthew et al.,

Just a little background, I work with the Arce-McShane lab at UChicago. We study orofacial sensorimotor behavior, and our subjects are rhesus macaques. I'm using CURBD to investigate directionality of currents between the M1 and S1 regions of the brain. So far I've only used local field potential data from our microelectrode arrays to create a CURBD model, but I'd like to use spike data too. I have an idea about how to do it, but I was hoping y'all could help me with a question about it.

I'm going to translate our spike data into mean firing rates, but I'll need to assume a time window in order to do that averaging. What size time window should I use for my mean firing rates that will be fed into CURBD as "activity"? My boss says it depends on what you're looking for, but it could be anywhere from 50 ms to 200 ms.

I'm also wondering if I could generate a CURBD from a binary Yes/No stream resampled at a constant rate from our spike data. Have you tried that or something similar?

Thanks,
Larry Sheridan
https://voices.uchicago.edu/fritziearcemcshanelab/