Catacomb 2 Examples

The examples are in roughly increasing order of complexity. The first two sections on the workbench and lab equipment are necessary to understand the rest but after that the order is less important.

• Workbench Basics. How to build models with the workbench - different operating models, component sets, setting parameters and displaying results.
• Lab Equipment.Generating and recording continuous signals and spikes.
• Integrate and Fire Cell Models. Adding properties to a simple integrator to make progressively more subtle cell models.
• Grouping and Reusing Components. Perhaps the most important feature if Catacomb 2 is its ability to group components and connections into new types of processing unit. These can then be used exactly like the elementary components. This way you can build structured hierarchical models without any duplication of effort.
• Animats Virtual Environments. Walls, sound sources, food dispensers et al. for setting up a behavioral experiment; Sensors and effectors for building a "robot" to experiment on.
• Synapses. Spikes arriving at a synapse trigger processes leading to conductance changes in the post-synaptic cell. These can be modeled at a variety of levels in Catacomb, including timing dependent plasticity functions and transmission modulation by external agents.
• Membrane Channels. In Catacomb2 integrate-and-fire models merge smoothly into channel-based models. You can mix and match components according to the behavior you want to study.
• Accessing the CoCoMac database. Catacomb2 includes an experimental interface to the CoCoMac database of connectivity in the macaque.
• Spike Routing The spike routing mechanism is still under development.