Do neocortical pyramidal neurons display stochastic resonance?
Michael Rudolph and Alain Destexhe
Journal of Computational Neuroscience 11: 19-42, 2001.
Abstract
Neocortical pyramidal neurons in vivo are subject to an intense
synaptic background activity which has a significant impact on various
electrophysiological properties and dendritic integration. Using detailed
biophysical models of a morphologically-reconstructed neocortical
pyramidal neuron, in which synaptic background activity was simulated
according to recent measurements in cat parietal cortex in vivo,
we show that the responsiveness of the cell to additional periodic
subthreshold stimuli can be significantly enhanced through mechanisms
similar to stochastic resonance. We compare several paradigms leading to
stochastic resonance-like behavior, such as varying the strength or the
correlation in the background activity. Interestingly, a new type of
resonance-like behavior was obtained when the correlation was varied,
in which case the responsiveness is sensitive to the statistics rather
than the strength of the ``noise''. We suggest that this type of resonance
may be relevant to information processing in the cerebral cortex.
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