The spatio temporal receptive field (STRF) of a neuron represents which types of stimuli excite or inhibit that neuron. If linearity is assumed, the neuron can be modelled as having a time-varying firing rate equal to the convolution of the stimulus with the STRF.

Auditory STRFs

The example STRF here is for an auditory neuron from the area CM of a male zebra finch, when played conspecific birdsong. The colour of this plot shows the effect of sound on this neuron: this neuron tends to be excited by sound from about 2.5 kHz to 7 kHz heard by the animal 12 ms ago, but it is inhibited by sound in the same frequency rage from about 18 ms ago. This STRF was generated with STRFPAK: free software (registration required) to help estimate STRFs.

Visual STRFs

Visual STRFs can have the same dimension as movies.