Air-driven eye shutter system for vision experiments using awake behaving animals

Abstract

When conducting physiological and behavioral experiments for vision research, we often need to present stimuli monocularly. In this report, we describe a new eye shutter system that was developed to occlude individual eyes during experiments with awake behaving animals. The eye of choice is occluded by an air pressure-driven opaque mask, the opening and closing of which is controlled by computer. This new eye shutter system has several advantages over other systems: (1) it can completely shield the eye from light using a physically opaque eye mask; (2) contamination of electrophysiological recordings by electrical noise is avoided because the actuator is not electrical; (3) the left and right eyes can be randomly occluded in each trial; (4) space for apparatus in front of the animal's face is not required. We used this eye shutter system to record neural activity from the primary visual cortex of awake monkeys and confirmed that this system is suitable for the monocular presentation of visual stimuli during electrophysiological recordings from awake animals.