Phototube can capture and transmit external illumination with high frequency into photocurrent in the nonlinear circuit, which can be tamed to produce the main dynamical properties of biological neurons. In fact, the involvement of functional electronic components can enhance the biophysical function of artificial neural circuits. In this paper, a photocell is connected to FitzHugh-Nagumo neural circuits, which can be excited by the photocurrent generated from the photocell. Furthermore, a memristor is proposed to couple two light-dependent neural circuits and the synchronization stability is investigated on the coupled dynamical systems by using standard scale transformation on the physical variables and parameters. It is found that phase synchronization and complete synchronization can be obtained by regulating the coupling channel connected by the memristor. The propagation and pumping of field energy are also calculated to predict the occurrence of synchronization. © 2020 Elsevier GmbH