Figure 5. Simulation of gain in efficiency using brain state-triggered stimulus delivery.
The advantages of state-triggered stimulus delivery for efficient study of the neural and behavioral effects of state-stimulus interaction increase for rare or brief ongoing states (for simulation details, see Materials and Methods). For example, for 200 ms duration states that are present 5% of the time (dark blue), state-triggered stimulus presentation leads to eight-fold more trials with a state-stimulus coincidence than random stimulus presentation. Neurophysiological techniques with higher single trial signal-to-noise and dimensionality can robustly identify such brief states online, and thus can benefit greatly from the proposed method.