Structural transformations of incoming informational signal by a single nonlinear oscillatory neuron or an artificial nonlinear neural network are investigated. The neurons are modeled as threshold devices so that the artificial nonlinear neural network under consideration are systems of nonlinear van der Pol type oscillatory neurons. The neurons are coupled by synaptic weight coefficients to endow the systems with the configuration topology of a chain or a ring. It is shown that the morphology of the outgoing signal – with respect to the shape, amplitude and time dependence of the instantaneous frequency of the signal – at the output of such a neural network has a higher degree of stochasticity than the morphology of the signal at the output of a single neuron. We conclude that the process of coding by a single neuron or an entire chain-like or circular neural network may be considered in terms of frequency modulations, which are known in Physics as a way to transmit information. We conjecture that frequency modulations constitute one of the ways of coding of information by the neurons in these types of neural networks.

Time-frequency and time dependence of the output signal morphology of nonlinear oscillator neuron based on Van der Pol model using analytical and numerical methods were investigated. Threshold effect neuron, when it is exposed to external non-stationary signals that vary in shape, frequency and amplitude was considered.