The effects of intrinsic noise on pattern recognition in a model pyramidal cell

Computer simulation of a CA1 hippocampal pyramidal cell is used to estimate the effects of synaptic and spatio-temporal noise on signal integration. Comparison is made between the pattern recognition ability of the cell in the presence of this noise and that of a computing unit in an artificial neural network model of an hetero-associative memory. The results indicate that the pattern recognition performance of the pyramidal cell is within an order of magnitude of that of the noise-free computing unit. Synaptic noise may be the most serious form of noise from those considered.