Coherence resonance in neuronal populations: Mean-field versus network model

The counterintuitive phenomenon of coherence resonance describes a nonmonotonic behavior of the regularity of noise-induced oscillations in the excitable regime, leading to an optimal response in terms of regularity of the excited oscillations for an intermediate noise intensity. We study this phenomenon in populations of FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) neurons with different coupling architectures. For networks of FHN systems in an excitable regime, coherence resonance has been previously analyzed numerically. Here we focus on an analytical approach studying the mean-field limits of the globally and locally coupled populations. The mean-field limit refers to an averaged behavior of a complex network as the number of elements goes to infinity. We apply the mean-field approach to the globally coupled FHN network. Further, we derive a mean-field limit approximating the locally coupled FHN network with low noise intensities. We study the effects of the coupling strength and noise intensity on coherence resonance for both the network and the mean-field models. We compare the results of the mean-field and network frameworks and find good agreement in the globally coupled case, where the correspondence between the two approaches is sufficiently good to capture the emergence of coherence resonance, as well as of anticoherence resonance.