Impact of the variations in the temperature on the first spike latency of a Hodgkin-Huxley neuron model

For stimuli just beyond threshold and certain noise strength, the Hodgkin–Huxley (HH) neuron model shows sensitivity to noise with respect to latency to first spike after stimulus onset. This effect has been called “noise delayed decay” (NDD). Here we investigate how the NDD is affected by the variation in temperature using a HH model that includes stochastic ion channels. We show that the NDD effect increases and emerges for smaller noise strengths (or larger cell sizes) as the temperature increases. We also show that the potassium channel noise plays a key role on the appearance of the NDD effect.