Accurate tracking and analysis of animal behavior is crucial for modern systems neuroscience. Animals can be easily monitored in confined, well-lit spaces or virtual-reality setups. However, tracking freely moving behavior through naturalistic, three-dimensional (3D) environments remains a major challenge. A closed-loop control that provides behavior-triggered stimuli and thus structures a behavioral task, is also more complicated in free-range settings. Here, we present EthoLoop: a framework for studying the neuroethology of freely roaming animals, including examples with rodents and primates. Combining real-time optical tracking, "on the fly" behavioral analysis with remote-controlled stimulus-reward boxes, allows us to directly interact with free-ranging animals in their habitat. Assembled with off-the-shelf and wireless hardware, we show that this closed-loop optical tracking system can be used to follow the 3D spatial position of multiple subjects in real time, continuously provide close-up views, condition behavioral patterns detected online with deep learning methods and be synchronized with wirelessly acquired neuronal recordings or with optogenetic feedback. Reward or stimulus feedback is provided by battery-powered and remote-controlled boxes that communicate with the tracking system and can be distributed at multiple locations in the environment. The EthoLoop framework enables a new generation of interactive, but well-controlled and reproducible neuroethological studies in large-field naturalistic settings.
We live surrounded by vibrations generated by moving objects. These oscillatory stimuli propagate through solid substrates, are sensed by mechanoreceptors in our body and give rise to perceptual attributes such as vibrotactile pitch (i.e. the perception of how high or low a vibration’s frequency is). Here, we establish a mechanistic relationship between vibrotactile pitch perception and the physical properties of vibrations using behavioral tasks, in which vibratory stimuli were delivered to the human fingertip or the mouse forelimb. The resulting perceptual reports were analyzed with a model demonstrating that physically different combinations of vibration frequencies and amplitudes can produce equal pitch perception. We found that the perceptually indistinguishable but physically different stimuli follow a common computational principle in mouse and human. It dictates that vibrotactile pitch perception is shifted with increases in amplitude toward the frequency of highest vibrotactile sensitivity. These findings suggest the existence of a fundamental relationship between the seemingly unrelated concepts of spectral sensitivity and pitch perception.
We live surrounded by vibrations generated by moving objects. These oscillatory stimuli can produce sound (i.e. airborne waves) and propagate through solid substrates. Pitch is the main perceptual characteristic of sound, and a similar perceptual attribute seems to exist in the case of substrate vibrations: vibro-tactile pitch. Here, we establish a mechanistic relationship between vibro-tactile pitch perception and the actual physical properties of vibrations using behavioral tasks, in which vibratory stimuli were delivered to the human fingertip or the mouse forelimb. The resulting perceptual reports were analyzed with a model demonstrating that physically different combinations of vibration frequencies and amplitudes can produce equal pitch perception. We found that the perceptually indistinguishable but physically different stimuli follow a common computational principle in mouse and human. It dictates that vibro-tactile pitch perception is shifted with increases in amplitude toward the frequency of highest vibrotactile sensitivity. These findings suggest the existence of a fundamental relationship between the seemingly unrelated concepts of spectral sensitivity and pitch perception.
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