AUTHOR=Jean-Richard-dit-Bressel Philip , Clifford Colin W. G. , McNally Gavan P. 

TITLE=Analyzing Event-Related Transients: Confidence Intervals, Permutation Tests, and Consecutive Thresholds

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience

VOLUME=Volume 13 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/molecular-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnmol.2020.00014

DOI=10.3389/fnmol.2020.00014

ISSN=1662-5099

ABSTRACT=Fibre photometry has enabled neuroscientists to easily measure targeted brain activity patterns in awake, freely behaving animal. A focus of this technique is to identify functionally-relevant changes in activity around particular environmental and/or behavioural events, i.e. event-related activity transients (ERT). A simple and popular approach to identifying ERT is to summarise peri-event signal (e.g. area under the curve [AUC], peak activity, etc) and perform standard analyses on this summary statistic. We highlight the various issues with this approach and overview straightforward alternatives: waveform confidence intervals and permutation tests. We introduce the rationale behind these approaches, describe the results of Monte Carlo simulations evaluating their effectiveness at controlling Type I and Type II error rates, and offer some recommendations for selecting appropriate analysis strategies for fibre photometry experiments.