Introduction
The Object Recognition or Novelty Response test is an important experiment to investigate the effects of drugs or knock outs on novelty response and memory. Therefore we developed a special Plug-In, that allows to collect expressive data from experiments performed with our tracking software Viewer.
Furthermore the Plug In allows you to administrate all your objects in use.
Parameters to detect object recognition events
To differentiate an animal's real interest in an object from just crossing the object, different parameters are important.
First of all you have to know, which part of the animal is close to the object. Real object interest take place, if an animal is close to an object with its nose. Therefore it is essential that our tracking software can detect the nose of an animal and its position inside the arena. In addition to the distance between object and nose, we measure if the object is within the animal's angle of view, the animal's locomotion velocity and the time the animal spends within the defined maximal distance. To make the data even more significant, you can determine whether or not object recognition events have to go along with sniffing behavior (head stretches).
User definable parameters are:
• Object within angle of view
• Max. distance to the object
• Max. Velocity within max. distance
• Min. Time within max. distance
• Sniffing behavior (head stretches)
You can decide which parameters you want to use: All, only one or a combination of some parameters.
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Configuration of the Object Recognition Plug-In
User definable parameters
To detect object recognition behavior you can implement your own definitions on each parameter. To find the parameter settings that deliver your desired outcome, the configuration can be varied and applied to a recorded animal track as often as necessary. |
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Object database
With the integrated object database you can manage your objects easily. For each object, you can put a name, a classification and a short description in the database.
You can then filter your experimental data, for example based on the objects, and the plug-in shows you all experiments that were made with a certain object on the fly.
In the next step, you simply select objects out of the database and assign these objects to your experimental arena(s).
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| Data Analysis
Single experiments and groups
Multiple experiment results can be pooled for a combined analysis. The table in the upper right corner contains one row for each experiment in a data pool. This pool is saved in a group file. The left table contains all object interest events of the experiment selected in the right table, whereas the table in the middle contains statistics for all experiments listed above. The tables provide the following data:
• Time of an inspection
• Duration of an inspection
• Which object has been inspected
• Latency to first visit
• Number of visits
• Percentage of visits
• Duration of the visits
• Percentage of the duration
In the display area in the lower part you can select diagrams for all different kinds of parameters calculated in the tables from a pull down menu.
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Inter group analysis
In addition to single experiment analysis and group statistics, the plug-in offers the possibility to compare group results, too. You can even move single experiments from one group to another in a comfortable way.
The figure on the right shows data for three different groups (interest in two objects).
All data and graphs can be exported in various formats.
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| The Attraction Factor
The Attraction Factor is a factor for each single object that is used in the experiments. It is a parameter that classifies the interest of animals in this single object without a second object being present.
Before starting with the object recognition experiments, the Attraction Factor is measured for each object you want to use.
How is the Attraction Factor measured?
Basically you do a novelty response experiment with this single object. The data of these experiments is stored in reference files.
How is the Attraction Factor used?
When you did the object recognition experiments you can use the reference files to normalize your experiments.
With this procedure it is possible to normalize all experiments by eliminating the difference in the individual object's attraction.
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If you have questions concerning this product, please don't hesitate to use the following e-mail address:
viewer@biobserve.com |
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