Colored noise and memory effects on formal spiking neuron models

Abstract: Simplified neuronal models capture the essence of the electrical activity of a generic neuron, besides being more interesting from the computational point of view when compared to higher dimensional models such as the Hodgkin-Huxley one. In this work, we propose a generalized resonate-and-fire model described by a generalized Langevin equation that takes into account memory effects and colored noise. We perform a comprehensive numerical analysis to study the dynamics and the point process statistics of the proposed model, highlighting interesting new features like: i) non-monotonic behavior (emergence of peak structures, enhanced by the choice of colored noise characteristic time-scale) of the coefficient of variation (CV) as a function of memory characteristic time-scale, ii) colored noise-induced shift in the CV, and iii) emergence and suppression of multimodality in the interspike interval (ISI) distribution due to memory-induced subthreshold oscillations. Moreover, in the noise-induced spike regime, we study how memory and colored noise affects the coherence resonance (CR) phenomenon. We found that for sufficiently long memory, CR is not only suppressed, but also the minimum of the CV $\times$ noise intensity curve that characterizes the presence of CR may be replaced by a maximum. The aforementioned features allow to interpret the interplay between memory and colored noise as an effective control mechanism to neuronal variability. Since both variability and non-trivial temporal patterns in the ISI distribution are ubiquitous in biological cells, we hope the present model can be useful in modeling real aspects of neurons.