Fig. 2.

An example spike train pair and its SPIKE-distance and A-SPIKE-distance profiles. (A) Two spike trains consisting of four events with five spikes each. The sequence is the same for all four events, only the time scale is getting shorter and shorter. From a global perspective the first event consists of non-synchronous individual spikes, while the last event consists of coincident bursts. The two events in the middle are intermediates. (B) The SPIKE-distance considers only the local context and thus the profile shape is the same for all four events. (C) The A-SPIKE-distance takes into account also the global time scales. Like the SPIKE-distance it judges the first event as very dissimilar, but in contrast to the SPIKE-distance it scales down the small spike time differences in the bursts and thus considers the coincident burst in the last event as very similar.