Activity propagation in neural fields involving transmission delay and external stimuli

The investigation of macroscopic brain activity, as encephalographic signals or local field potentials, plays an important role in the neuropsychology and are supposed to reflect the activity of neural populations. Thus in order to understand information processing in the brain, it is necessary to examine the space-time activity of neural populations, whose activity is strongly related to macroscopic experimental data. The presented work examines an Amari-like neural field model and presents the effects of spatial nonlocal interactions in neural populations while involving general synaptic connectivities and axonal transmission delay. The effects of external constant stimulation, random fluctuations and spatiotemporal stimuli are studied. We find space-time instabilities, traveling fronts, stimulus-evoked propagating pulses and noise-retarded phase transitions.