Construction And Application Of An Arduino-based Automatic Animal Behavioral Platform

Animals have the ability to optimize their behavior when subjected to environmental change.Animals' behavioral researching is important to the understanding of their surviving and evolution.The mechanism underlying animals' behavioral is also a core issue to psychology and neuroscience.Behavioral researches are basically accessed through experiments,like Pavlovian conditioning and operant conditioning.As these experiments require delivering stimulations and monitoring responses reliably,it's indispensable to acquire an automatic platform for sequential-controlling devices.Ever since the first behavioral platform was invented back to a century ago,many similar platforms,from commercial or open-sourced,have been devised.However,most of them have considerable defects,such as high cost for large copies of experiments,low time accuracy for controlling devices strictly and too hard for non-engineers to learn.To address these issues,we designed a novel Arduino-based behavioral platform(ArControl: Arduino Control),which provided an affordable,easy-to-use solution with experimentally proved high time accuracy and reliable performance.The main contents of this thesis include:(1)Designing and constructing ArControl platform.The hardware component was consisted of an Arduino board and a simple driver circuit,which enable the platform to simultaneously manage multiple input and output devices.As for software,the ArControl provided a stand-alone and intuitive GUI(graphical user interface)application.Users can design their experimental task by graphical operation,without any prerequisite knowledge about programming languages.(2)Optimizing and testing the technical performance of ArControl platform.Through a novel way,ArControl allowed the behavioral task to be entirely stored in and operated on the Arduino chip alone.Therefore,ArControl was a genuine real-time system with promising high temporal resolution.Via technical tests,the temporal resolution turns out to be <1 ms,which means the ArControl is suitable for common behavioral experiments.(3)Applying the ArControl platform to actual behavioral experiments.Two kinds of mice behavioral tasks were conducted in ArControl,including a head-fixed “Go/No-Go” task and a free-moving “2AFPC” task.The experimental data were perfectly consistent with previous reports,which means the ArControl is reliable and flexible for multiple behavioral researches.