Abstract
High-throughput automated experiments accelerate discovery in neuroscience research and reduce bias. To enable high-throughput behavioral experiments, we developed a user-friendly and scalable automated system that can simultaneously train hundreds of mice on behavioral tasks, with time-stamped behavioral information recorded continuously for weeks. We trained 12 cages of C57BL/6J mice (24 mice, 2 mice/cage) to perform auditory behavioral tasks. We found that circadian rhythms modulated overall behavioral activity as expected for nocturnal animals. However, auditory detection and discrimination accuracy remained consistently high in both light and dark cycles. We also found a periodic modulation of behavioral response rates only during the discrimination task, suggesting that the mice periodically reduce task engagement (i.e., take “breaks”) when task difficulty increases due to the more complex stimulus–response paradigm for discrimination versus detection. Our results highlight how automated systems for continuous high-throughput behavioral experiments enable both efficient data collection and new observations on animal behavior.
Highlights
Targeted investigation of the links between genetics, the brain, and behavior has seen rapid advancement because of powerful new tools for high-throughput experiments (Rose et al, 2016; Sofroniew et al, 2016; Kuchibhotla et al, 2017; Francis et al, 2018)
We used auditory tasks because the auditory system is crucial for human and animal communication, auditory deficits are associated with many sensory and cognitive diseases (Corcoran et al, 2002; Ewing and Grace, 2013; Zhou et al, 2015), and mice are readily trained on auditory tasks (Kurt and Ehret, 2010; Gess et al, 2011; Poddar et al, 2013; de Hoz and Nelken, 2014; Francis and Kanold, 2017)
We found that the area under the latency histogram (AULH) was greater for hit versus early responses for both dark and light cycles, indicating good task performance accuracy
Summary
Targeted investigation of the links between genetics, the brain, and behavior has seen rapid advancement because of powerful new tools for high-throughput experiments (Rose et al, 2016; Sofroniew et al, 2016; Kuchibhotla et al, 2017; Francis et al, 2018). Automated behavioral experiments (Gess et al, 2011; Schaefer and Claridge-Chang, 2012; Poddar et al, 2013; de Hoz and Nelken, 2014; Francis and Kanold, 2017; Balzani et al, 2018) in mice will enable the advancement of neurosci-. Received March 27, 2019; accepted August 26, 2019; First published September 5, 2019.
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