Hi everyone,
I’m very new to PsychoPy and the world of touchscreen based experiments. Has anyone ever utilized PsychoPy to design touchscreen based operant tasks for rodents? For example, a lab rat touches a specific stimuli on the screen and gets a food reward.
If so, I’m wondering if anyone recommend a touchscreen brand with decent sensitivity that can easily interface to a Windows 10 PC (perhaps via USB), and if PsychoPy can run multiple screens at the same time?
I tried searching the forum for “rat” and came up only posts on “rating” scales and “mouse” posts that have to do with mouse clicks.
Thank you!
-Foster
This might be a good question for @Benjamin_Seitz
He works with birds rather than rodents, but many of the principles should be the same.
Thanks @Michael.
My lab uses touchscreen equipped operant chambers for training pigeons. We have a pre-print under review describing our entire setup, which should be helpful, and provide some relevant sources on using touchscreens in rats.
Briefly, we use an infrared touchscreen (Carroll Touch, Elotouch Systems, Fremont, CA) that sits in front of monitor and is connected via USB. Integration to windows 7 or 10 is seamless, and beam breaks are essentially treated exactly like a mouse click. This allows us to use the mouse feature on Psychopy and code to program tasks with different reinforcement schedules (e.g, FR5, VR5, etc). The more difficult task will be connecting your TS to an output device that delivers your food reward. We use a robotic arm (Pololu Maestro 12 Channel USB Servo, Pololu Robotics, Las Vegas, NV) that raises to deliver food based on a given command. In the pre-print you’ll see sources from various other labs that are using TS in rats, and so you may be able to ask them how they achieve this.
I can’t upload a PDF to the forum, so you can email me for the pre-print. bseitz1(at)ucla.edu
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