Exercises

Every chapter of the book 'Dynamic thinking - A primer on dynamic field theory' contains exercises that support the understanding of the theoretical concepts by hands-on work. The exercises are based on simulators written in our Matlab framework COSIVINA. This page provides step-by-step guides to get all the software to run on your computer and will get you going on the exercises.

Setting up COSIVINA

To work on the exercises, you will need the following software packages:

  • Matlab
  • COSIVINA
  • JSONlab (required by COSIVINA)

First, install Matlab on your computer. If you need help with this, please refer to the support pages of Mathworks.

Second, follow our installation guide or the video on the right to install COSIVINA and JSONlab.

EXERCISE 1

The first exercise of the book covers a single dynamic activation variable with input. In it, you will use a Matlab simulator to explore how a dynamical system tracks a shifting input, what determines the relaxation time of a dynamics, and how stability of the system comes about.

The video on the right contains a complete description of all elements of the simulator as well as a walk-through of the entire first exercise.

If you would like to try it for yourself, here is a quick guide on how to get started with the exercise. 

  1. Open Matlab, navigate to the cosivina folder (using the 'cd' command or the directory navigation bar).
  2. Inside the cosivina folder, open the folder 'examples' and find the file 'launcherTwoNeuronSimulator.m'. Open the file and then run it by clicking on the button with the green arrow on it, labeled 'Run'. This should open a GUI window with plots and control buttons.
  3. Now you can follow along the exercise description. Good luck!