ANY-maze Help > I/O devices supported by ANY-maze > Legacy I/O devices > The Parallel Rod floor test > Performing experiments with the Parallel Rod cage > Analysing the results of Parallel Rod floor test experiments

Analysing the results of Parallel Rod floor test experiments

Introduction

As we saw in the previous topic of this tutorial, ANY-maze shows the results of individual tests in the Test details report. However, you will usually want to view and analyse the results of all the tests in an experiment together, and we will learn how to do just that in this topic. But first, we will look in a little more detail at what results ANY-maze can report for tests performed in the Parallel Rod cage.

Parallel Rod cage results

There are only a few results that are set up as part of the Parallel Rod floor test protocol, but there are many more results vailable to you. The great thing is that ANY-maze will automatically calculate these, regardles of whether they are selected or not - so if you realise that there's some extra measure that you want to look at, you can just select it and it will already be calculated.

The results that are shown by default for the Parallel Rod floor test are:

The first two of these are standard results taken from the enormous number of results that ANY-maze calculates by default, whereas the Ataxia ratio is specific to the Parallel Rod floor test, and is a calculation which has been set up to calculate the number of foot slips per metre travelled (to ignore the varying locomotor activity between animals).

The results listed above are shown by default on the Test details report, as well as on the Data page - but in each of these places you can select any number of additional results to display for an individual test. The quickest way to change which results are displayed is under the Analysis section of the ANY-maze Protocol page.

Viewing collated results

Earlier in this tutorial we saw how we could view results for individual tests, but you will typically want to look at results that are collated into groups - for example, treatment groups or perhaps stages of the experiment. This is what the ANY-maze Results page is for.

The Results page gives you access to Text and Graph reports of your experiment's data, as well as Statistical analysis. ANY-maze includes more than 40 different stats tests including a wide range post-hoc tests. We don't pretend that ANY-maze is a replacement for a full stats package such as SPSS, but it does provide a quick and easy way to analyse your results and it doesn't require very much knowledge of stats, as it automatically ensures that the stats tests used suit the data being analysed.

To switch to the Results page, just click the Results tab above the ribbon bar. The help topic on the Results page gives a detailed description of how to create and work with Results reports.

Analysing tests across time

Usually ANY-maze will report results for entire tests, so you will see data for things like the Ataxia ratio for the whole test duration. However, you may wish to see how the animals' behaviour changed across the duration of the tests - in other words you may want results for different parts of the test, rather than for all of it.

ANY-maze provides two mechanisms for analysing tests across time: you can divide the tests into equal duration segments (sometimes called 'time bins') and then analyse results between the segments, and/or you can define different Time periods and then analyse results for each period individually. Both of these option are described in detail in the Analysis across time topic.

Moving your results elsewhere

While the Results page described in the previous section can show all the results of an experiment, it does this in a format that's designed to be easy for you to understand, but which is not very amenable to export to other programs. To view results in a more 'exportable' format you need to switch to the Data page (by clicking the Data tab above the ribbon bar).

The data page shows the results of an experiment in a spreadsheet format - the rows of the spreadsheet are the individual tests, while the columns are the results. You can use the Select data button to switch to a page where you can select the columns you want included and/or filter the tests, so, for example, only tests for a certain treatment are shown.

The spreadsheet can be copied, simply by right-clicking and selecting Copy... from the menu which appears, and then pasted directly into programs such as Excel or SPSS. You can also save the spreadsheet to a file, again by right clicking and selecting Save... from the menu which appears.

That's all folks!

That wraps up this Parallel Rod floor test tutorial. If you've read the whole thing, then you should now have a fairly good idea about how the Parallel Rod cage and ANY-maze work, and you can probably get started right away performing your experiments.

If you have questions, then you'll find that the help contains a huge amount of information, which you can search. You'll also find that help is context sensitive, that's to say if you switch to the Help page you will be shown help on whatever it is that you're doing at the time. (Note that context sensitivity can be switched on and off using an option in the Window section of the Help page ribbon bar.)

And if you can't find the answer to a question, then just contact ANY-maze Support - we're always happy to help and we usually respond to questions very quickly.

See also:

The topics listed below are general topics relating to ANY-maze, and may refer to features not available or required with a Parallel Rod cage.

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ANY-maze help topic T1250