A Locally active memristors can mimic neural synapses, resulting in rich neuro-morphological dynamics in biological neurons. To illustrate the impact of a local active memristive synapse, we consider coupled Hindmarsh–Rose (HR) neurons. Firstly, the dynamical transitions of the proposed system are investigated using bifurcation analysis and Lyapunov exponents, and we find that the transition between periodic and chaotic states depends on the input currents and memristive coupling strength. By performing the two-parameter analysis, the existence of periodic and chaotic regions is revealed. The collective behavior is then examined by expanding the network to include memristive coupled HR neurons under different network connectivities. We show that the system achieves synchronization behavior for all network connectivities, including regular, random, and small-world, when the strength of the memristive coupling is increased.