Rodent visual behavior

General Paradigm
The animal is placed in a training box that has visual stimuli and response/reward ports on one wall. The animal requests a trial by putting its nose in the central nose poke, at which time the stimulus appears on the screen. The animal is trained to make a two-alternative forced choice based on some feature of the stimulus, and to indicate its response by going either to the right or left port. Correct responses are rewarded with water. Incorrect responses are penalized by an enforced delay, and indicated by distinct visual and auditory stimuli. Several example tasks are illustrated below.

Click on the image to see a rat performing an orientation discrimination task. Two stimuli appear in each trial; the task is to go to the side with the horizontal grating. The stimulus remains on only while the animal's nose is in the center port. Naive rats learn this task to criterion in 2 weeks.	Click on the image to see a squirrel doing an orientation discrimination task. The task is the same as shown for the rat, but now the spatial frequency of the grating also varies. (We also have a quicktime version of this movie).
Here the task of the rat is to go to the side of the screen towards which the majority of the dots are moving. The task can be made more difficult by making fewer of the dots go the same direction (low coherence), or by making the the dots smaller, fainter, faster or slower.	Here the rat has learned to go to the side of the screen where the statue is shown to find water; the stimuli are normalized to the same size and contrast. The task can be made more difficult by using more similar objects.

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