Figure 8

Switchings between Up and Down states induced by finite-size fluctuations in a recurrent networks of Poisson neurons with STP. (A) Microscopic simulation of a fully connected network of \(N=50\) neurons. The population activity shows switches between Up and Down states. (B) Time-averaged population activity \(\langle A^{N} \rangle _{t}\) (which depends on the probabilities of being in the Up and Down states) for different population sizes. Microscopic simulations (black dots) are compared to mesoscopic simulations with the first- and second-order MF equations (blue and red lines, respectively). Note that, for \(N\sim 100\) neurons, the first-order MF approximation predicts significantly larger \(\langle A^{N} \rangle _{t}\) indicating larger residence times in the Up state due to underestimation of finite-size noise. The same set of parameters are used in (A) and (B) and details are in Appendix E. Superscript (^N) of \(A^{N}\) is omitted in the legends