Stimulating the network

Stimulating devices inject signals into a network, either as analog signals such a currents or as spike trains. Most stimulating devices are implemented so that they are replicated on each virtual process. Many, but not all devices generating noise or stochastic spike trains provide different signals to each of their recipients; see the documentation of the individual device.

Stimulating devices share the start, stop, and origin parameters global to devices. Start and stop have the following meaning for stimulating devices (origin is just a global offset):

• For spike-emitting devices, only spikes with times t that fulfill start < t <= stop are emitted. Note that spikes that have time t==start are NOT emitted.

• For current-emitting devices, the current is activated and deactivated such that the current first affects the target dynamics during the update step (start, start+h], i.e., an effect can be recorded at the earliest at time start+h. The last interval during which the current affects the target’s dynamics is (stop-h, stop].