In this paper, we study the effect of non-Gaussian channel noise (NCN) on the spiking coherence of a single and an array of bi-directionally coupled Hodgkin–Huxley neurons, mainly investigating how the non-Gaussian character of channel noise affects the coherence resonance (CR) induced by channel noise and by the number of neurons. It is found that, when NCN's deviation q from Gaussian distribution is increased, the CR moves to larger patch area (smaller channel noise) and smaller neuron number, which means that CR occurs in bigger ion channel clusters and smaller neuron number when q is increased. This result shows that, depending on the type of NCN, CR occurs in different sizes of ion channel clusters and numbers of neurons. The underlying mechanism is briefly discussed in terms of the property of NCN. These findings may help to better understand the roles of NCN for improving the time precision of the information processing in coupled stochastic neurons.
Inverse stochastic resonance induced by ion channel noise
