We develop two iteration schemes for construction of localized stationary solutions (bumps) of a one-population Wilson-Cowan model with a smoothed Heaviside firing rate function. The first scheme is based on the fixed point formulation of the stationary Wilson-Cowan model. The second one is formulated in terms of the excitation width of a bump. Using the theory of monotone operators in ordered Banach spaces we justify convergence of both iteration schemes.

a b s t r a c tWe study the existence and continuous dependence of stationary solutions of the onepopulation Wilson-Cowan model on the steepness of the firing rate functions. We investigate the properties of the nonlinear nonlocal operators which arise when formulating the stationary one-population Wilson-Cowan model as a fixed point problem. The theory is used to study the existence and continuous dependence of localized stationary solutions of this model on the steepness of the firing rate functions. The present work generalizes and complements previously obtained results as we relax on the assumptions that the firing rate functions are given by smoothed Heaviside functions.

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We study the existence of fixed points to a parameterized Hammertstain operator H β , β ∈ (0, ∞], with sigmoid type of nonlinearity. The parameter β < ∞ indicates the steepness of the slope of a nonlinear smooth sigmoid function and the limit case β = ∞ corresponds to a discontinuous unit step function. We prove that spatially localized solutions to the fixed point problem for large β exist and can be approximated by the fixed points of H∞. These results are of a high importance in biological applications where one often approximates the smooth sigmoid by discontinuous unit step function. Moreover, in order to achieve even better approximation than a solution of the limit problem, we employ the iterative method that has several advantages compared to other existing methods. For example, this method can be used to construct non-isolated homoclinic orbit of a Hamiltionian system of equations. We illustrate the results and advantages of the numerical method for stationary versions of the FitzHugh-Nagumo reaction-diffusion equation and a neural field model.2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. 47H30, 47N60, 47G10, 45L05, 45J05, 92B20.