Stochastic Resonance in Neuron Models: Endogenous Stimulation Revisited

The paradigm of stochastic resonance (SR)---the idea that signal detection and transmission may benefit from noise---has met with great interest in both physics and the neurosciences. We investigate here the consequences of reducing the dynamics of a periodically driven neuron to a renewal process (stimulation with reset or endogenous stimulation). This greatly simplifies the mathematical analysis, but we show that stochastic resonance as reported earlier occurs in this model only as a consequence of the reduced dynamics.Comment: Some typos fixed, esp. Eq. 15. Results and conclusions are not affecte

Markov analysis of stochastic resonance in a periodically driven integrate-fire neuron

We model the dynamics of the leaky integrate-fire neuron under periodic stimulation as a Markov process with respect to the stimulus phase. This avoids the unrealistic assumption of a stimulus reset after each spike made in earlier work and thus solves the long-standing reset problem. The neuron exhibits stochastic resonance, both with respect to input noise intensity and stimulus frequency. The latter resonance arises by matching the stimulus frequency to the refractory time of the neuron. The Markov approach can be generalized to other periodically driven stochastic processes containing a reset mechanism.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figure

Bandpass Properties of Integrate-Fire Neurons

There is mounting experimental evidence that the nervous system utilizes neural noise to improve sensory signal transmission. Here, we investigate the response properties of a noisy neuron using an integrate-fire model. When the neuron is driven by periodic input, noise optimally improves the signal-to-noise ratio of the elicited spike train, if the driving frequency is in a certain range. This phenomenon, called bona fide stochastic resonance, is analyzed in a Markov chain formalism which avoids implausible assumptions made in earlier studies. The bandpass property of the transmission function of the neuron may explain why certain oscillation frequencies are prevalent in cortex. Key words: Integrate-fire neuron ; Stochastic resonance ; Ornstein--Uhlenbeck process ; Markov chain 1 Introduction There is mounting experimental evidence that the nervous system utilizes the noise ubiquitous in neurons to improve sensory signal transmission [10,18,3,11]. Here, we consider neural noise from ..