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Topographica

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Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience

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Synonyms

FeatureMapper; ImaGen; Param; ParamTk; Topographica neural map simulator

Definition

Topographica is a simulator for large-scale neural models, with special support for neurons organized into topographic maps and for modelling activity-dependent development. A typical Topographica model will cover a complete pathway from the sensory periphery to regions in the cortex, modelling at least several square millimeters of cortical tissue. To make working at this scale practical, Topographica groups neurons into Sheets, which each typically correspond to a large subpopulation of cells organized in two dimensions across the surface of a neural area. Using this abstraction, Topographica can implement a very large variety of possible models with relatively little coding and thus provides a platform for understanding properties that emerge only when large numbers of neurons are interconnected. The Topographica project also provides reusable, general-purpose components for other scientific...

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References

  • Bednar JA (2009) Topographica: building and analyzing map-level simulations from Python, C/C++, MATLAB, NEST, or NEURON components. Front Neuroinform 3:8

    Article  PubMed Central  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  • Bednar JA, Kelkar A, Miikkulainen R (2004) Scaling self-organizing maps to model large cortical networks. Neuroinformatics 2:275–302

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Further Reading

  • Miikkulainen R, Bednar JA, Choe Y, Sirosh J (2005) Computational maps in the visual cortex. Springer, Berlin

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation, School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Dr. James A. Bednar

Authors
  1. Dr. James A. Bednar
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to James A. Bednar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Dieter Jaeger

  2. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA

    Ranu Jung

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© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Bednar, J.A. (2013). Topographica. In: Jaeger, D., Jung, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_263-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7320-6_263-5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-7320-6

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