Dynamics of the average activity on neural populations

GONZALO URIBARRI; GABRIEL MINDLIN; MARCOS TREVISAN

París

Encuentro; 2017 Annual Meeting of the International Physics of Living Systems (iPoLS) Network; 2017

International Physics of Living Systems (iPoLS) Network'

Many models of how the nervous system works in order to generate a motor control output are phenomenological in nature. They aim at describing the average activity of different neural populations, and the rules governing their dynamics are proposed through vector fields that capture some expected features of the solutions, as it is the case for additive neural models as the Wilson Cowan oscillator. In this work we show how to compute the average activity of a population of coupled phase equations, individually tuned to display excitable dynamics. We compare the solutions of these first principle equations with the one of equivalent phenomenological models, and discuss cases where both approaches lead to qualitatively different scenarios.