a platform for building rodent touchscreen-based visuomotor tasks
Every project has a beautiful feature showcase page. It’s easy to include images in a flexible 3-column grid format. Make your photos 1/3, 2/3, or full width.
To give your project a background in the portfolio page, just add the img tag to the front matter like so:
---
layout: page
title: project
description: a project with a background image
img: /assets/img/12.jpg
---
Caption photos easily. On the left, a road goes through a tunnel. Middle, leaves artistically fall in a hipster photoshoot. Right, in another hipster photoshoot, a lumberjack grasps a handful of pine needles.
This image can also have a caption. It's like magic.
You can also put regular text between your rows of images. Say you wanted to write a little bit about your project before you posted the rest of the images. You describe how you toiled, sweated, bled for your project, and then… you reveal its glory in the next row of images.
You can also have artistically styled 2/3 + 1/3 images, like these.
The code is simple. Just wrap your images with <div class="col-sm"> and place them inside <div class="row"> (read more about the Bootstrap Grid system). To make images responsive, add img-fluid class to each; for rounded corners and shadows use rounded and z-depth-1 classes. Here’s the code for the last row of images above:
Touchscreen-based behavioral assays provide a robust method for assessing cognitive behavior in rodents, offering great flexibility and translational potential. The development of touchscreen assays presents a significant programming and mechanical engineering challenge, where commercial solutions can be prohibitively expensive and open-source solutions are underdeveloped, with limited adaptability. Here, we present Visiomode (www.visiomode.org), an open-source platform for building rodent touchscreen-based behavioral tasks. Visiomode leverages the inherent flexibility of touchscreens to offer a simple yet adaptable software and hardware platform. The platform is built on the Raspberry Pi computer combining a web-based interface and powerful plug-in system with an operant chamber that can be adapted to generate a wide range of behavioral tasks. As a proof of concept, we use Visiomode to build both simple stimulus-response and more complex visual discrimination tasks, showing that mice display rapid sensorimotor learning including switching between different motor responses (i.e., nose poke versus reaching). Commercial solutions are the go-to for rodent touchscreen behaviors, but the associated costs can be prohibitive, limiting their uptake by the wider neuroscience community. While several open-source solutions have been developed, efforts so far have focused on reducing the cost, rather than promoting ease of use and adaptability. Visiomode addresses these unmet needs providing a low-cost, extensible platform for creating touchscreen tasks. Developing an open-source, rapidly scalable and low-cost platform for building touchscreen-based behavioral assays should increase uptake across the science community and accelerate the investigation of cognition, decision-making and sensorimotor behaviors both in health and disease.
