title: Emergence of oscillations and spatio-temporal coherence states in a continuum-model of excitatory and inhibitory neurons.
abstract: A neural field model of the reaction-diffusion type for the emergence of oscillatory phenomena in visual cortices is proposed. To investigate the joint spatio-temporal oscillatory dynamics in a continuous distribution of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, the coupling among oscillators is modelled as a diffusion process, combined with non-linear point interactions. The model exhibits cooperative activation properties in both time and space, by reacting to volleys of activations at multiple cortical sites with ordered spatio-temporal oscillatory states, similar to those found in the physiological experiments on slow-wave field potentials. The possible use of the resulting spatial distributions of coherent states, as a flexible medium to establish feature association, is discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering, University of Genoa, Via all'Opera Pia 11a, I-16145 Genova, Italy. silvio@dibe.unige.it
authors.forename: Silvio P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Sabatini
authors.forename: Fabio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Solari
authors.forename: Luca
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Secchi
mesh_terms: D008959:Models, Neurological; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*