Determining the variations in response latency of one or several
neurons to a stimulus is of interest in different contexts. Two
common problems concern correlating latency with a particular
behavior, for example the reaction time to a stimulus, and adjusting
tools for detecting synchronization between two neurons. We use two
such problems to illustrate the latency testing and estimation
methods developed in this paper. Our methods joins a growing number
of latency testing and estimation methods, although they have their
own advantages. Our test for latencies is a formal statistical test
which produces a p-value. It is applicable for Poisson and
non-Poisson spike trains via use of the bootstrap. Our estimation
method is model free, and its performance compares favorably to
other methods currently available, both in terms of efficiency and
accuracy. Additionally, we show how our latency estimates can be
used as starting values for other latency estimation methods.