How neurons process their inputs crucially determines the dynamics of
biological and artificial neural networks. In such neural and neural-like
systems, synaptic input is typically considered to be merely transmitted
linearly or sublinearly by the dendritic compartments. Yet, single-neuron
experiments report pronounced supralinear dendritic summation of sufficiently
synchronous and spatially close-by inputs. Here, we provide a statistical
physics approach to study the impact of such non-additive dendritic processing
on single neuron responses and the performance of associative memory tasks in
artificial neural networks. First, we compute the effect of random input to a
neuron incorporating nonlinear dendrites. This approach is independent of the
details of the neuronal dynamics. Second, we use those results to study the
impact of dendritic nonlinearities on the network dynamics in a paradigmatic
model for associative memory, both numerically and analytically. We find that
dendritic nonlinearities maintain network convergence and increase the
robustness of memory performance against noise. Interestingly, an intermediate
number of dendritic branches is optimal for memory functionality