  Using the generating functional analysis an exact recursion relation is
derived for the time evolution of the effective local field of the fully
connected Little-Hopfield model. It is shown that, by leaving out the feedback
correlations arising from earlier times in this effective dynamics, one
precisely finds the recursion relations usually employed in the signal-to-noise
approach. The consequences of this approximation as well as the physics behind
it are discussed. In particular, it is pointed out why it is hard to notice the
effects, especially for model parameters corresponding to retrieval. Numerical
simulations confirm these findings. The signal-to-noise analysis is then
extended to include all correlations, making it a full theory for dynamics at
the level of the generating functional analysis. The results are applied to the
frequently employed extremely diluted (a)symmetric architectures and to
sequence processing networks.
