AnimatLab Spiking Chemical Synapses

This tutorial describes how to use spiking chemical synapses with your integrate and fire neuron models within the AnimatLab simulation environment (http://animatlab.com). AnimatLab is a neuromechanical simulation system that allows you to build a physically accurate, biomechanical model of the body an organism. Hill muscle models within that body can be controlled using biologically realistic neural networks to reproduce behaviors found in the real animals.

Spiking chemical synapses can be either excitatory or inhibitory. What determines this is the equilibrum potential. If the equilibrum potential is less negative than the membrane voltage then it will allow positive current to flow into the cell to depolarize it. In this case the equilibrum potential is set to -10 mv, while our resting potential is set at -60 mv. If we look at the hyperpolarizing IPSP then we can see its equilibrum potential is set at -70 mv, which is lower than the resting potential and will cause inhibition when it is is activated.

Synaptic conductance is modelled in the following manner. First, the pre-synaptic neuron generates a spike. There can then be a user-defined delay between the occurrence of that spike and the post-synaptic effect. Once the delay is over the conductance for this synapses is immediately changed to value of its synaptic conductance. The conductance value then slowly declines over time in an exponential manner that is controled by the decay rate parameter. The longer the decay rate the longer it takes for the conductance to go back to zero, and the more of an effect that synapse will have on the post-synaptic neuron.

In this tutorial I will show you how to use spiking chemical synapses within animatlab.

Видео AnimatLab Spiking Chemical Synapses канала NeuroRoboticTech