This lesson covers spike-rate adaptation, the process by which a neuron's firing pattern decays to a low, steady-state frequency during the sustained encoding of a stimulus.

This lesson provides a brief explanation of how to implement a neuron's refractory period in a computational model.

In this lesson, you will learn a computational description of the process which tunes neuronal connectivity strength, spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP).

This lesson reviews theoretical and mathematical descriptions of correlated spike trains.

This lesson investigates the effect of correlated spike trains on spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP).

This lesson goes over synaptic normalisation, the homeostatic process by which groups of weighted inputs scale up or down their biases.

In this lesson, you will learn about the intrinsic plasticity of single neurons.

This lesson covers short-term facilitation, a process whereby a neuron's synaptic transmission is enhanced for a short (sub-second) period.

This lesson describes short-term depression, a reduction of synaptic information transfer between neurons.

This lesson briefly wraps up the course on Computational Modeling of Neuronal Plasticity.

The goal of computational modeling in behavioral and psychological science is using mathematical models to characterize behavioral (or neural) data. Over the past decade, this practice has revolutionized social psychological science (and neuroscience) by allowing researchers to formalize theories as constrained mathematical models and test specific hypotheses to explain unobservable aspects of complex social cognitive processes and behaviors. This course is composed of 4 modules in the format of Jupyter Notebooks. This course comprises lecture-based, discussion-based, and lab-based instruction. At least one-third of class sessions will be hands-on. We will discuss relevant book chapters and journal articles, and work with simulated and real data using the Python programming language (no prior programming experience necessary) as we survey some selected areas of research at the intersection of computational modeling and social behavior. These selected topics will span a broad set of social psychological abilities including (1) learning from and for others, (2) learning about others, and (3) social influence on decision-making and mental states. Rhoads, S. A. & Gan, L. (2022). Computational models of human social behavior and neuroscience - An open educational course and Jupyter Book to advance computational training.  ​​​Journal of Open Source Education, 5(47), 146. https://doi.org/10.21105/jose.00146

This book was written with the goal of introducing researchers and students in a variety of research fields to the intersection of data science and neuroimaging. This book reflects our own experience of doing research at the intersection of data science and neuroimaging and it is based on our experience working with students and collaborators who come from a variety of backgrounds and have a variety of reasons for wanting to use data science approaches in their work. The tools and ideas that we chose to write about are all tools and ideas that we have used in some way in our own research. Many of them are tools that we use on a daily basis in our work. This was important to us for a few reasons: the first is that we want to teach people things that we ourselves find useful. Second, it allowed us to write the book with a focus on solving specific analysis tasks. For example, in many of the chapters you will see that we walk you through ideas while implementing them in code, and with data. We believe that this is a good way to learn about data analysis, because it provides a connecting thread from scientific questions through the data and its representation to implementing specific answers to these questions. Finally, we find these ideas compelling and fruitful. That’s why we were drawn to them in the first place. We hope that our enthusiasm about the ideas and tools described in this book will be infectious enough to convince the readers of their value.