Unconventional criticality, scaling breakdown, and diverse universality classes in the Wilson-Cowan model of neural dynamics Piuvezam, Helena Christina Marin, Bóris Copelli, Mauro Muñoz Martínez, Miguel Ángel M.A.M. acknowledges the Spanish Ministry and Agencia Estatal de investigación (AEI) through Project of Ref. PID2020-113681GB-I00, financed by MICIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and FEDER “A way to make Europe,” as well as the Consejería de Conocimiento, Investigación Universidad, Junta de Andalucía, and European Regional Development Fund, Project No. P20-00173 for financial support. H.C.P. acknowledges CAPES (PrInT Grant No. 88887.581360/2020-00) and is grateful for the hospitality of the Statistical Physics group at the Instituto Interuniversitario Carlos I de Física Teórica y Computacional at the University of Granada during her six-month stay, during which part of this work was developed. M.C. acknowledges support by CNPq (Grants No. 425329/2018-6 and No. 308703/2022-7), CAPES (Grant No. PROEX 23038.003069/2022-87), and FACEPE (Grant No. APQ-0642-1.05/18). This article was produced as part of the activities of Programa Institucional de Internacionalização (PrInt). We are also very thankful to R. Corral, S. di Santo, V. Buendia, J. Pretel, and I. L. D. Pinto for valuable discussions and comments on previous versions of the manuscript. The Wilson-Cowan model constitutes a paradigmatic approach to understanding the collective dynamics of networks of excitatory and inhibitory units. It has been profusely used in the literature to analyze the possible phases of neural networks at a mean-field level, e.g., assuming large fully connected networks. Moreover, its stochastic counterpart allows one to study fluctuation-induced phenomena, such as avalanches. Here we revisit the stochastic Wilson-Cowan model paying special attention to the possible phase transitions between quiescent and active phases. We unveil eight possible types of such transitions, including continuous ones with scaling behavior belonging to known universality classes—such as directed percolation and tricritical directed percolation—as well as six distinct ones. In particular, we show that under some special circumstances, at a so-called “Hopf tricritical directed percolation” transition, rather unconventional behavior is observed, including the emergence of scaling breakdown. Other transitions are discontinuous and show different types of anomalies in scaling and/or exhibit mixed features of continuous and discontinuous transitions. These results broaden our knowledge of the possible types of critical behavior in networks of excitatory and inhibitory units and are, thus, of relevance to understanding avalanche dynamics in actual neuronal recordings. From a more general perspective, these results help extend the theory of nonequilibrium phase transitions into quiescent or absorbing states. 2023-11-03T12:50:19Z 2023-11-03T12:50:19Z 2023-09-11 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Helena Christina Piuvezam, Bóris Marin, Mauro Copelli, and Miguel A. Muñoz. Unconventional criticality, scaling breakdown, and diverse universality classes in the Wilson-Cowan model of neural dynamics. Phys. Rev. E 108, 034110. [https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.108.034110] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/85448 10.1103/PhysRevE.108.034110 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional American Physical Society