Response of autaptic Hodgkin-Huxley neuron with noise to subthreshold sinusoidal signals

In this work, we investigated the response of a stochastic Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) neuron with an autapse to subthreshold sinusoidal signals. It is found that the autapse not only adjusts the stochastic responses, but also improves the detection of subthreshold signals. In the case of weak noise, the autapse facilitates the response of neuron to the subthreshold sinusoidal signals with a small parameter region in tdelay-ω space. The increased noise intensity enlarges this parameter region and increases the corresponding response frequency in such range. As the autaptic intensity increases, however, this parameter region shrunks. We also observed that there is an optimal range of the delay time of autapse, within which the stochastic HH neuron fires action potentials with high frequency. The corresponding response spike train for the optimal delay time is nearly a regular sequence with the interspike intervals approximated to the delay time. The current results reveal a novel resonance phenomenon facilitated by autapse, named autaptic delay-induced coherence resonance.