New Patterns of Activity in a Pair of Interacting Excitatory-Inhibitory Neural Fields

In this Letter, we study stationary bump solutions in a pair of interacting excitatory-inhibitory (E-I) neural fields in one dimension. We demonstrate the existence of localized bump solutions of persistent activity that can be maintained by the pair of interacting layers when a stationary bump is not supported by either layer in isolation-a scenario which may be relevant as a mechanism for the persistent activity associated with working memory in the prefrontal cortex and may explain why bumps are not seen in in vitro slice preparations. Furthermore, we describe a new type of stationary bump solution arising from a pitchfork bifurcation which produces a stationary bump in each layer with a spatial offset that increases with the bifurcation parameter.