Heteroclinic binding

Abstract

Here we consider a new mechanism of binding between different information modalities in the brain, i.e. heteroclinic binding. The basic model that we propose is able to explain the origin of the coordination of competitive dynamics of active brain modes representing the temporal processing of different sensory and/or intrinsic information (different modalities) in parallel. The model describes the coordination of spatio-temporal patterns in the form of sequential switchings corresponding to different modalities. We formulate the conditions for the existence of a multimodality heteroclinic sequence (MHS) in the phase space of this model. Such a sequence appears due to inhibitory connections between different sensory networks that implement a winnerless competition interaction. Computer simulations illustrate the robustness of the switching of the coordinated sequences for different modalities and their mutual regularization and modulation.

Keywords:

• winnerless competition
• heteroclinic sequence
• neural dynamics
• multisensory integration

Acknowledgements

M.I. Rabinovich acknowledges support from ONR grant N00014-07-1-074. V. Afraimovich was partially supported by PROMEP grant UASLP-CA21. P. Varona was supported by MICINN BFU2009-08473 and CAM S-SEM-0255-2006. We thank two anonymous referees for their constructive comments that helped to improve this manuscript.