Abstract
String-pulling by rodents is a behavior in which animals make rhythmical body, head, and bilateral forearm as well as skilled hand movements to spontaneously reel in a string. Typical analysis includes kinematic assessment of hand movements done by manually annotating frames. Here, we describe a Matlab-based software that allows whole-body motion characterization using optical flow estimation, descriptive statistics, principal component, and independent component analyses as well as temporal measures of Fano factor, entropy, and Higuchi fractal dimension. Based on image-segmentation and heuristic algorithms for object tracking, the software also allows tracking of body, ears, nose, and forehands for estimation of kinematic parameters such as body length, body angle, head roll, head yaw, head pitch, and path and speed of hand movements. The utility of the task and software is demonstrated by characterizing postural and hand kinematic differences in string-pulling behavior of two strains of mice, C57BL/6 and Swiss Webster.
Highlights
String-pulling is a proto-tool behavior in which an animal pulls on a string to obtain a reward
We present a Matlab-based toolbox to facilitate the analyses of video data of different strains of intact or neurologically compromised mice engaged in string pulling
We present a Matlab based toolbox for seamlessly processing mouse string-pulling video data to perform whole-body assessment of position and speed as well as automatically identify the body, ears, nose, and hands in individual video frames
Summary
String-pulling is a proto-tool behavior in which an animal pulls on a string to obtain a reward. If animals are presented with an overhanging string, they adopt a standing or sitting posture and use hand-over-hand movements to reel in the string (Blackwell et al, 2018a; Blackwell et al, 2018b; Blackwell et al, 2018c). The movement is an on-line act, guided by sensory information from snout vibrissea, and features four hand shaping movements for grasping and releasing the string, and five arm movements for retreiving and advancing the string that are similar in mice, rats, and humans (Blackwell et al, 2018a; Singh et al, 2019)
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