Mathematical Modeling of Working Memory in the Presence of Random Disturbance using Neural Field Equations

In this paper, we describe a neural field model which explains how a population of cortical neurons may encode in its firing pattern simultaneously the nature and time of sequential stimulus events. Moreover, we investigate how noise-induced perturbations may affect the coding process. This is obtained by means of a two-dimensional neural field equation, where one dimension represents the nature of the event (for example, the color of a light signal) and the other represents the moment when the signal has occurred. The additive noise is represented by a Q-Wiener process. Some numerical experiments reported are carried out using a computational algorithm for two-dimensional stochastic neural field equations.