This site has a nice big list of software for visual psychophysics. It’s very extensive and includes free as well as commercial solutions: visual stimuli, analysis, teaching, hardware, and more.
Posts tagged with behavior
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December 30, 2011
Optics Planet and Braintree Scientific and New Era syringe pumps: Inexpensive scientific equipment
Optics Planet has a nice selection of inexpensive microscopes and other lab equipment. Such as these chubby, potential Cute Overload stars from Nikon (above, the blue one that is taking a bow is $380).
Braintree Scientific also has a really nice selection of reasonably priced equipment. Tons of very interesting, unique products. Get the catalog and flip through it– the website isn’t so nice to browse. They do custom work too, in case you have something specific in mind. One of their new products is a netbook+syringe pump package, pictured below:
I recognize the syringe pump as one of New Era’s OEM pumps. New Era sells all kinds of syringe pumps, from barebones OEM devices ($500, controlled via RS-232), to digital ($750) and multi-syringe units ($1500). You can use one of the OEM units for things like delivering water rewards in behavior rigs.
We covered a simple lickometer circuit previously. Another useful interface is a capacitive touch sensor. In contrast to light gate sensors, there are no extra photons floating around that could disturb an imaging device, and the touch required gives gentle tactile feedback. In practice, they can be much lower noise as well, in case of a simultaneous electrical recording.
The popular Qprox QT113 (datasheet) makes implementing a capacitive touch sensor dirt simple. If you’d like something more than a simple go-nogo signal, then the AD7746 24-bit Capacitance-to-Digital Converter is for you (datasheet). Using this chip, you can use a capacitance measurement as a proxy for pressure, or some other parameter. For example, if you use a large plate sensor, you can estimate the portion of the animal on the sensor at any one time. For most users, the QT113 will suffice. And its datasheet has some helpful diagrams to get your circuit off the ground.
More links
SensorWiki article on Capacitative Sensing
Tom Igoe’s blog entry on Capacitative Sensing with the QT113 chips (includes microcontroller code)
Lickometers detect when an animal, usually a rodent, licks a water port. They’re useful in all sorts of behavioral tasks, ranging from addiction experiments (spike the water and see how much they consume), to psychophysics experiments (e.g., GO-NOGO type paradigms). Basically, there is a metal spout that gets licked while the animal stands on a metal floor, and then the animal’s body completes a circuit. The electrical signal gets converted to a TTL pulse which is measured using standard data acquisition devices. These devices are available commercially (e.g., Med Associates), but I recently tested an elegant circuit that you can use to build your own.
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