Cross-spectral measurement of neural signal transfer

Abstract

The phenomenon of noise enhanced signal transfer, or stochasticresonance, has been observed in many nonlinear systems such asneurons and ion channels. Initial studies of stochastic resonancefocused on systems driven by a periodic signal, and hence used asignal to noise ratio based measure for comparison between theinput and output of the system. It has been pointed out that forthe more general case of aperiodic signals other measures arerequired, such as cross-correlation or information theoreticaltools. In this paper we present simulation results obtained in amodel neural system driven by a broadband aperiodic signal, andproducing a signal imitating neural spikes. The system is analyzedby using cross-spectral measures.