Do neocortical pyramidal neurons display stochastic resonance?

Neocortical pyramidal neurons in vivo are subject to an intense synaptic ba ckground activity that has a significant impact on various electrophysiolog ical properties and dendritic integration. Using detailed biophysical model s of a morphologically reconstructed neocortical pyramidal neuron, in which synaptic background activity was simulated according to recent measurement s in cat parietal cortex in vivo, we show that the responsiveness of the ce ll to additional periodic subthreshold stimuli can be significantly enhance d through mechanisms similar to stochastic resonance. We compare several pa radigms leading to stochastic resonance-like behavior, such as varying the strength or the correlation in the background activity. A new type of reson ance-like behavior was obtained when the correlation was varied, in which c ase the responsiveness is sensitive to the statistics rather than the stren gth of the noise. We suggest that this type of resonance may be relevant to information processing in the cerebral cortex.