ANY-maze Help > I/O devices supported by ANY-maze > The ANY-maze Operant interfaces > Creating an Operant protocol

Creating an Operant protocol

Introduction

In this section, we are going to look at the steps involved in setting up a simple protocol for your Operant cage. This can then be used as a basis for more specific protocols, depending on the requirements of your experiments.

As you may already know, protocols are fundamental to how ANY-maze works because it is the protocol which defines how an experiment will be performed. Even if you have never used ANY-maze before, you will probably get along fine just following though the steps in this section, but if you want to know more about protocols then a good place to start is this introductory tutorial on protocols.

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Creating an experiment

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Setting the protocol mode and adding an Operant cage

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Reviewing the Operant cage protocol elements

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Setting the test duration

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Setting up fields to record additional information about your animals or tests

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Using procedures to manage your test

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Saving the protocol

Creating an experiment

Before you can do anything in ANY-maze, you need to open an experiment. In this respect, ANY-maze is similar to Microsoft Word, where you can't do anything until you open a document. So the first thing you need to do is to start ANY-maze and select New empty experiment from the list of protocols on the right side of the opening page.

On the other hand, if ANY-maze is already running, you should simply switch to the File page, select New experiment from the list on the left and then select New empty experiment from the list of protocols on the right.

Setting the protocol mode and adding your Operant cage

Now that you have an experiment open, you need to set the protocol mode and then add an Operant cage to the protocol.

A protocol mode> provides a short-cut to building protocols for specific pieces of equipment, and it's particularly useful in the case of the ANY-maze Operant interface where you might have several apparatus that you'd like to set up in an identical way in order to run tests in them all simultaneously.

Switch to the Protocol page by clicking the Protocol tab in the ribbon bar.

Click the first item in the list on the left of the page - this will probably be called 'Unnamed protocol'.

If you have an Operant-specific ANY-maze licence (which will usually be the case unless you already owned ANY-maze when you bought your ANY-maze Operant interfaces), then the protocol mode will already be Operant mode. If it isn't, then open the protocol mode list and select this mode, as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1. You should use the Protocol mode list to select Operant mode.

Next, we need to add our Operant cages to the protocol. This will tell ANY-maze which cage (or cages) we actually want to use. You can include up to 40 cages in an experiment, but to keep things simple we'll just include one. So, you now need to click the

Add item button and then select Add connected Operant cages from the menu that appears - see figure 2.

Figure 2. Select the Add connected Operant cages menu option to add one or more cage(s) to the protocol.

Selecting the Add connected Operant cages option opens a wizard allowing you to set up the cage(s) for inclusion in your protocol. The first page of this wizard lists the cage(s) connected to your computer (figure 3). By default all the connected cages are selected, but you can select or deselect individual cages to choose only those that you want to include, or use the Select all or Deselect all buttons. When you're done, click Next.

Figure 3. The Add connected Operant cages menu option opens a window from which you can choose the cage(s) to add to the protocol.

The next page of the wizard allows you to set up the components attached to the cage (figure 4). If you've already set up your cage, the components that you've set up will be listed; if not then you can add or edit the components for use in this protocol. For more details on how to do this, see Configuring the ports of an ANY-maze Operant interface.

Figure 4. The Configure Operant interfaces page is a window from which you can choose the cage(s) to add to the protocol.

When you add an Operant cage, it appears in the protocol list, as in figure 5.

Figure 5. Operant cages are added to the protocol list.

Selecting the cage's entry in the list causes its settings to be displayed in the settings pane to the right of the list; see figure 6.

By the way, this is how the entire protocol works - you add things using the Add item button, they get included in the protocol list and you can then select them and alter the settings in the settings pane.

Figure 6. The Operant cage settings pane.

The settings for an ANY-maze Operant interface are automatically set to default values, and you probably won't need to change them. Something to note is the Test control switch, which is the red button on top of the Operant interface - this is automatically available to start and stop tests in the attached chamber. For more details on using a test control switch to start tests, see Controlling tests using a key or switch.

Reviewing the ANY-maze Operant interface protocol elements

Because ANY-maze already knows you are setting up a protocol for an ANY-maze Operant interface (since that's the mode we put it into), it will automatically have added various I/O elements to the protocol when you added the Operant cage. These elements will depend on the components that you added to your interface.

Figure 7. Some ANY-maze Operant interface I/O elements which have been automatically added to the protocol list. This is just one example, and may differ from what you see.

You will usually not need to make any changes to these elements, although if any of them are marked with a or image, you should review them to see what action is required.

Setting up stages and specifying the test duration

Another element that is automatically included in an ANY-maze Operant interface protocol is a Stage. This is because ANY-maze requires that all protocols always include at least one stage, and an Operant protocol is no exception.

A stage is simply a test (or a group of tests) that you perform on your animals. In many cases, an experiment will simply have one stage consisting of one test (for each animal) and that is the default setting for an Operant protocol. Of course, you can change this if you wish. For example, you might have two stages in your experiment; in the first stage you test the animals without any treatment, while in the second stage you treat them and then test them again. In this case, you would simply need to add a second stage to the protocol.

To see the stage, select Stages > First stage in the protocol list; the Settings pane will then show the stage's settings, as in figure 8.

Figure 8. The default settings for the first stage in an Operant protocol

Full details about stages can be found here, but suffice to say that it is in the stage's settings that you specify the duration of your tests. As can be seen in figure 8, ANY-maze does not include a default duration, so you will need to set this value before you can actually perform any tests - Just type in a duration, for example '2 min' or '60s'.

Throughout ANY-maze, times can be specified using units of 'ms' for milliseconds, 's' for seconds, 'min' or 'm' for minutes, 'h' for hours and 'd' for days. You can mix these units if you wish, for example '3h 30min', and you can use decimal points, for example '3.5h'.

Setting up fields to record additional information about your animals or tests

This step is optional

If you wish, you can set up 'fields' in your protocol to record additional information about your animals or tests. For example, you may be keen to differentiate between how male and female animals respond, in which case you will presumably want to record their Sex somewhere. Of course, you could just note this on a piece of paper, but instead you could set up a 'Sex' field and record the data within ANY-maze. Not only would this mean that all the data relating to the experiment would all be in one place, but you could also then use ANY-maze's analysis features to analyse the animals' sex - perhaps to check that there is no significant difference between male and female animals.

You can create any number of fields, and they can be used as either independent or dependent variables in analysis. Full details about fields and how to set them up can be found here.

Using procedures to manage your test

An operant experiment won't be much use unless ANY-maze can respond to actions the animal takes (for example, pressing a lever) with a response (for example, dispensing a pellet). The way that ANY-maze does this us using procedures.

If you've run through the step-by-step tutorial for the ANY-maze Operant interface, you'll have seen a couple of simple examples of procedures to get you started. Alternatively, there's some more comprehensive examples of Writing a procedure using the procedure editor in the Procedures section of this manual - we highly recommend looking at those to find out more about this incredibly flexible and powerful part of the ANY-maze software.

Save the protocol

You may have noticed that other than adding the Operant cage (or cages) to the protocol, the only other thing we had to add to the protocol was the duration of the tests. Nevertheless, you will typically add some fields, or alter the default settings a little, and this being the case you will usually want to save the protocol so you can use it again in other experiments. To do this, you need to click the Save protocol button in the ribbon bar.

Creating an Operant protocol

Introduction

Creating an experiment

Setting the protocol mode and adding your Operant cage

Reviewing the ANY-maze Operant interface protocol elements

Setting up stages and specifying the test duration

Setting up fields to record additional information about your animals or tests

Using procedures to manage your test

Save the protocol

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