Daniel's Blog

Cognitive neuroscience, R programming, and more...

Bossy Fish are Bad Mentors in a Consensus Task

Are Dominant Individuals the Better Leaders? A Study in Cichlid Fish Suggests Otherwise.

Biologists and neuroscientists from the University of Texas at Austin (USA), the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz (Germany), and the University of Konstanz (Germany) found that, in a species of social, ray-finned fish, the influence of dominant individuals on the behaviour of group members is highly context dependent.

Posted by Daniel Schmidtke Thursday, December 3, 2020

SIT - Sensory Island Task

A New Behavioral Paradigm to Study Sensory Perception and Neural Processing in Freely Moving Animals

This blog post is about SIT, a behavioral paradigm we recently published. In SIT, animals explore an open field arena to find a hidden target. For target detection, they rely solely on changes in the presented stimulus, which is controlled by closed-loop position tracking in real-time. The blog will mostly cover the application of SIT for acoustic discrimination training in mouse lemurs.

Posted by Daniel Schmidtke Sunday, October 25, 2020

DIY - Food Dispenser

Building an Arduino-controlled Food Dispenser for Behavioral Experiments

This blog post provides instructions on how to build an arduino-controlled food dispenser for positively conditioned behavioral/cognitive experiments in an open field maze.

Posted by Daniel Schmidtke & Sönke von den Berg Sunday, October 25, 2020

DIY - Open Field Maze

Building a High Quality Open Field Maze from Scratch

This blog post provides detailed instructions on how to build an open field maze with illuminated floor plate, allowing for high quality automated video tracking of small animals for behavioral research.

Posted by Daniel Schmidtke & Sönke von den Berg Sunday, October 18, 2020