Adaptation of the transfer function of the Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) neuronal model

The transfer functions of sensory neurons are known to adapt to the statistics of the input signals. It is however unclear whether such adaptation arises from the nonlinear dynamics of the neuron or emerges from the collective interaction among neurons embedded in a network. We investigated the Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) neuronal model's response to Gaussian white noise signals of different variances and found that the recovered kernel adapt its preferred temporal frequency and its energy gains according to noise variance. This adaptation is likely a consequence of the cooperative interaction between the noises and the bifurcation dynamics of the neurons. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.