Dynamical response, information transition and energy dependence in a neuron model driven by autapse

Autapses are a class of special synapses of neurons. In those neurons, their axons are not connected to the dendrites of other neurons but are attached to their own cell bodies. The output signal of a neuron feeds back to itself, thereby allowing the neuronal firing behavior to be self-tuned. Autapses can adjust the firing accuracy of a neuron and regulate the synchronization of a neuronal system. In this paper, we investigated the information capacity and energy efficiency of a Hodgkin-Huxley neuron in the noisy signal transmission process regulated by delayed inhibitory chemical autapse for different feedback strengths and delay times. We found that the information transmission, coding efficiency, and energy efficiency are maximized when the delay time is half of the input signal period. With the increase in the inhibitory strength of autapse, this maximization is increasingly obvious. Therefore, we propose that the inhibitory autaptic structure can serve as a mechanism and enable neural information processing to be energy efficient.