- m@cortex
Introduction to m@cortex ('matcortex')
These pages are devoted to a set of Matlab routines that I wrote to analyze behavioral and neurophysiological data collected with CORTEX, a program developed by Bob Desimone and his group.
The package presented here consists of a collection of functions that provide basic behavioral and electrophysiological data analysis capabilities. The end user will typically embed calls to my code in her own scripts and functions, tailored to the specific task at hand.
At the core of the package lay 3 object classes (Matlab provides limited object-oriented programming tools, but I found those useful enough to hide the actual data, thus preventing inadvertent modifications, and provide the user with a consistent interface, hopefully :)
- @cortex objects contain behavioral and physiological data collected during a single experiment;
- @key objects contain criteria for selecting subsets of trials and analysis epochs from @cortex objects;
- @spix objects are collections of spike data from any number of @cortex objects, useful to run batch analyses on multiple units.
Getting help
In these pages, you will find some general information on the software. Please choose a topic on the left side.
If you are new to these routines, or if you have not been keeping up with the latest developments, you may want to go through the tutorial.
Reference on individual functions is available as standard Matlab help text, e.g.:
>> help meanfiringrate
Note that some functions are overloaded, i.e., different m-files are called depending on the argument list. To obtain help on functions that share the same name but act on different types of objects, the appropriate class name must be used. For example:
>> help meanfiringrate
>> help cortex/meanfiringrate
>> help spix/meanfiringrate
will provide information specific for each implementation of meanfiringrate. Note that Matlab automatically appends a list of overloaded methods to a function's help text. Try for example:
>> help meanfiringrate