Figure 5

Total number of attractors (open circles) of a five-population network and the number of final states (open squares) reachable after perturbing an initial state \((01001 )\) with single square-pulse stimuli, applied equally to all units. Panel (a) shows bistable regions in the \(w_{{\text{self}}}\)-θ plane with and without depression, enclosed by solid black lines and dashed blue lines, respectively. The blue and red dots indicate parameters \((w_{{\text{self}}},\theta )\) used to perform the simulations. The table below panel (a) lists the color codes for the three cases: (1) \(w_{{\text{self}}}=40\) with depression (blue), (2) \(w_{{\text{self}}}=20\) without depression (red), and (3) \(w_{{\mathrm{self}}}=40\) without depression (black). Panels (b) and (c) show trial-averages of total attractor numbers and the number of reachable states as functions of the mean \(\mu = \langle w_{ij} \rangle \) and the standard deviation \(\sigma ={\text{std}} (w_{ij} )\)