English: Diagram showing how the STA is calculated. A stimulus (consisting here of a checkerboard with random pixels) is presented, and spikes from the neuron are recorded. The stimuli in some time window preceding each spike (here consisting of 3 time bins) are selected (color boxes) and then averaged to obtain the STA. The STA indicates that this neuron is selective for a bright spot of light just before the spike, in the top-left corner of the checkerboard.