Behavioral neuroscience links systems-level circuitry to behavior, cognition and emotion and is thus critical for understanding the afflictions that affect neuropsychiatric patients. Linking cognitive changes in a behaving rat or mouse to targeted manipulations of neural circuitry requires the convergence of expertise from scientific fields inside and outside of neuroscience. In designing research projects to understand the anatomy, genetics, and pharmacology underlying the control of behavior, researchers must understand the nature of the task, its measurements, and how to interpret the data. Several steps lie between the design of the experiment and the behavioral output, including choice of task (e.g., operant vs mazes), how to train the animal (shaping vs conditioning), the type of surgical manipulation (ablation, cannulation, inactivation, stimulation, etc.), and the format of data for analysis (summary vs. trial-by-trial). Most neuroscience researchers who use standard off-the-shelf behavioral tasks (such as forced swim, rotarod and T-Maze) are not experts in the psychology of behavior and must therefore rely on experts in the domain of cognition. Complex cognitive behavior in rodents is often gauged by measuring the pattern of behavioral responses in tasks that involve, for example, decision-making, attention, memory, rule learning, flexibility, discrimination, and problem solving. In these tasks, rats and mice typically indicate their decisions by nose-poking visual patterns on a touchscreen like an iPad, making nose-poke entries into a series of lit holes, or depressing an extended lever triggered by time or cues. Some cognitive functions extrapolated from animal behavior have positively informed our investigation of cognitive functions in humans. Such animal-to-human approaches (e.g., delayed response) have directed the design and development of analogous tests for use in humans (e.g., self-ordered working memory). Behavioral neuroscience has also benefitted in the opposite direction by means of human-to-animal approaches as in the case of extradimensionsal/intradimensional set shifting, a test based upon the principles of the human Wisconsin Card Sorting Task. Together, these advances in behavioral testing have been particularly useful in establishing the neuroanatomical and neurochemical pathology for specific cognitive deficits in a range of brain and behavior disorders. In addition to providing equipment, training and consulting for researchers interested in using rodents as models to investigate disorders of brain and behavior, one important goal for the rodent behavioral core (RBC) is to continue to design and develop cutting edge behavioral methods and applications while maintaining facility resources at a high level of utility for users at all levels of expertise. This requires constant maintenance and calibration of equipment, user education and interaction, and commitment to setting the standard as the best Rodent Behavioral Core facility in the world in terms of research quality. In the past year, the labs of several principal Investigators from NIMH, as well as NINDS, NIA, NIDCD, NHGRI, NICHD and NICCH have used the RBC to conduct behavioral studies in an efficient and targeted manner. To date, the labs of 37 principal investigators have used the RBC facility with over 100 trainees that have used specific resources in the Core. Recently, we custom designed and developed new tasks to measure various aspects of visual and olfactory perception. We have also instituted a mechanism to record ultrasonic vocalization from groups of rodent families to measure social communication as assessment of emotion. As requested by many principal investigators, we installed optogenetic equipment in operant chambers, mazes and open testing arenas. Due to the high demand for modern tools for motor analyses like foot-foot spacing, paw pressure, distance travelled, body rotation, stride length, and toe spread, we invested in a Gait Scan motor analysis system to provide highly sensitive and noninvasive detection and assessment of skilled motor performance that can be used to evaluate several neurological and neuromuscular disorders. In addition to providing equipment resources, we have written custom code for several users to enable detailed levels of behavioral quantification or analyses for their experiments. For example, general motor activity data is usually indexed as duration and location of activity. With custom code, weve been able to provide researchers with additional measures such as speed of activity as well as visual patterns of the movement. For the future, our plan is to integrate observed behavior with high speed tracking using LabDeepCut, an open source code computer vision technique to accurately quantify behavior using a pose estimation of body parts. Its major advantage is that it allows the user to go directly from the data set creation to automatic behavioral analysis. It will also provide a means to standardize behavioral testing in an open-access manner so that data generated in the RBC can be shared between collaborators. Finally, because many researchers expressed an interest in combining electrophysiological methods with awake behavior, we acquired a SmartBox electrophysiology system to acquire local field potentials, as well as single and multiple unit recordings. Importantly, this system integrates seamlessly with nearly every behavioral system or software in the RBC. Most recently, we enabled methods of fiber photometry with spatial mazes and tests of emotional memory.
