Resources
Authors & Affiliations
Alexander Wallerus, Sofia Castro E Almeida, Aron Koszeghy, Arsenii Petryk, Maja Überegger, Johannes Passecker
Abstract
Investigating the contribution of various neuronal circuits to our information processing, learning, and actions is often limited by the difficulty of providing precise and scalable complex experiences with detailed behavior measurements.Despite recent advances, existing behavior platforms are typically optimized for few, often simple tasks with constrained extendability, and priced prohibitively for scale, while behavior tracking requires work intensive labeling to generate situation-specific training data.Here, we present work on two novel open and flexible tools to enable easier pursuit of new experiment designs and their analysis.Our newly developed behavior system enables any experiment designs that you can code in python. Teensy®- or Arduino connectable electronics can easily be integrated. The highly cost-effective setup provides experiment control through customizable state progressions, integration of stimuli like displays, and tracking of task variables and camera capture at high temporal precision for on- or offline usage. A configurable user interface with live plotting allows for experiment feedback and interactions, while 3D printable components enable further modularity and accessibility for the neuroscience community. Our easy-to-use system enables new head-fixed- or freely-moving experiment designs. As examples we present a variety of established and novel task designs like a multi-step olfactory task and a head-fixed explorable game environment.We further present a new video analysis tool for effortless behavior tracking that integrates advanced functionalities such as detecting and tracking the respective mask of a mouse or its paws by open-vocabulary prompting for “mouse” or “paw”.