SPIKY: A graphical user interface for monitoring spike train synchrony

In recent years three time-resolved measures of spike train synchrony have been proposed, the ISI-distance, the SPIKE-distance, and event synchronization. The Matlab source codes for calculating and visualizing these measures have been made publicly available. However, due to the many different possible representations of the results the use of these codes is rather complicated and their application requires some basic knowledge of Matlab. Thus it became desirable to provide a more user-friendly and interactive interface. Here we address this need and present SPIKY, a graphical user interface which facilitates the application of time-resolved measures of spike train synchrony to both simulated and real data. SPIKY includes implementations of the ISI-distance, the SPIKE-distance and SPIKE-synchronization (an improved and simplified extension of event synchronization) which have been optimized with respect to computation speed and memory demand.