In this paper, a statistic that has been introduced to test for space-time correlation is considered in a time series context. The null hypothesis is white noise; the alternative is any kind of continuous functional dependence. For an autoregressive process close to the null hypothesis, a bound on the distance between the distribution of the statistic and a Poisson distribution is proved, using the Stein-Chen method. The main difficulty in the proof is that the dependence in the time series is not locally restricted. The result implies asymptotically certain discrimination for a reasonable choice of the thresholds.
