Power spectrum and critical exponents in the 2D stochastic Wilson-Cowan model

I Apicella; S Scarpetta; L de Arcangelis; A Sarracino; A de Candia

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-26392-8

Power spectrum and critical exponents in the 2D stochastic Wilson-Cowan model

Sci Rep. 2022 Dec 19;12(1):21870. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-26392-8.

Authors

I Apicella^{1

2}, S Scarpetta^{2

3}, L de Arcangelis⁴, A Sarracino⁵, A de Candia^{6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics "E. Pancini", University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy.
² INFN, Section of Naples, Gruppo collegato di Salerno, Fisciano, Italy.
³ Department of Physics "E. Caianiello", University of Salerno, Fisciano, Italy.
⁴ Department of Mathematics and Physics, University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", Caserta, Italy.
⁵ Deparment of Engineering, University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli", Aversa, Italy.
⁶ Department of Physics "E. Pancini", University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy. decandia@na.infn.it.
⁷ INFN, Section of Naples, Gruppo collegato di Salerno, Fisciano, Italy. decandia@na.infn.it.

Abstract

The power spectrum of brain activity is composed by peaks at characteristic frequencies superimposed to a background that decays as a power law of the frequency, [Formula: see text], with an exponent [Formula: see text] close to 1 (pink noise). This exponent is predicted to be connected with the exponent [Formula: see text] related to the scaling of the average size with the duration of avalanches of activity. "Mean field" models of neural dynamics predict exponents [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] equal or near 2 at criticality (brown noise), including the simple branching model and the fully-connected stochastic Wilson-Cowan model. We here show that a 2D version of the stochastic Wilson-Cowan model, where neuron connections decay exponentially with the distance, is characterized by exponents [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] markedly different from those of mean field, respectively around 1 and 1.3. The exponents [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] of avalanche size and duration distributions, equal to 1.5 and 2 in mean field, decrease respectively to [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]. This seems to suggest the possibility of a different universality class for the model in finite dimension.