Icon for PhysioFriend The Physiologist's Friend Simulator

PhysioFriend lets you plot receptive fields of simulated retinal and cortical cells. It is intended for classroom demonstration of cell response properties. You can hear the cell responses as though you were doing a recording from a live animal. You can choose between photoreceptor, horizontal cell, on and off bipolar cells, on and off ganglion cells, and several types of cortical cells. You can use bar, edge, or grating stimuli. You will hear how the cell responds as you use your mouse to move the stimulus. The stimulus orientation, contrast, size, spatial frequency can be easily manipulated through the keyboard.

PhysioFriend is 100% written in Java. All you need is the Java run time environment (at least version 1.3+) and a sound card--if you want to hear the cells. (If you don't have a sound card, you can still see the cells responses on an activity meter.)

Requirements:

Apple's Java Runtime Environent is apparently far behind other releases. PhysioFriend does not seem to run well, even under the JRE 1.3.1 that ships with OS10.2. The components of PhysioFriend show up very strangely and response is extremely slow. For the moment, it looks like you cannot run PhysioFriend on Macs.

Downloading, installing, and running PhysioFriend:

Quick user guide

 

How it works

PhysioFriend does a relatively simple-minded simulation of the cells. The intention is not to simulate the beautiful complexity of the visual system, but just to capture some aspects of how the cells seem to respond. These cell responses should pass the Turing test—they should behave and sound like real cells.

Version information

If you use Java Web Start, you will always be up-to-date with the latest version.

Authors

PhysioFriend was written by Christof Marti and Tobi Delbruck at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University and ETH Zurich, Switzerland.