ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Protocol page > The elements of a protocol > Testing > Stages > Including an accustomisation period

Including an accustomisation period

Introduction

In some situations, you may wish to place an animal in your apparatus before you start a test so that it has a chance to get accustomed to it. For example, in a water-maze you might place the animal on the island before its first trial, so that it at least knows there's an island there.

Although you might think that you could simply place the animal in the apparatus, wait for your accustomisation period to end, and then start the test, this won't always work. A problem arises because ANY-maze assumes (in most cases) that the apparatus is empty, i.e. doesn't contain an animal, before a test starts. Therefore if the animal is already in the apparatus, the system will get confused. To resolve this, you need to tell ANY-maze if you plan to use an accustomisation period like this in your tests. This has the added benefit that the system will then time the accustomisation period for you too.

By the way, if you plan to include an accustomisation period, but you intend to remove the animals from the apparatus between the end of the period and the start of the test, then you don't have to tell ANY-maze about it at all.

By default, ANY-maze assumes that a stage won't include an accustomisation period; so if you don't want one, there's nothing for you to do.

Including an accustomisation period in a test is generally a good idea if the period is quite short, for example an hour or two at most, but if you intend to place the animal in the apparatus for a long period of time before you start the test (perhaps days), then using an accustomisation period is not very satisfactory because your computer will have to be on for the entire period and you won't be able to use it to perform any other experiments. In these circumstances, it's better to use the protocol's Tracking options to specify that the animal will already be in the apparatus at the start of the test - see this topic for details of how this works.

The accustomisation sub-element

Each Stage element in a protocol automatically includes some sub-elements, one of which can be used to set up the stage's accustomisation period - see figure 1.

Figure 1. A stage's Accustomisation period sub-element is used to define a period before the start of the test, during which the animal will be in the apparatus but won't be tracked.

Selecting this sub-element displays the accustomisation settings, which you can use to specify whether an accustomisation period should be included, and how long it will be.

This option will only appear if the current protocol mode includes video tracking.

Defining an accustomisation period

If you want a stage to include an accustomisation period, then you should first check the box titled Include an accustomisation period at the start of the trials in this stage, and then enter the duration of the period.

The value you enter can use any of the units: d (days), h (hours), min or m (minutes), or s (seconds). You can mix units and also specify decimal values. So, for example, the period of eight and a half minutes could be entered as '8.5min', '8min 30s', or '510s'. If you don't specify any units, then seconds will be assumed. You can enter any value from 1 second to 24 hours.

Next, you should specify whether the period should be included at the start of all the trials in the stage. If you specify that the period won't be included at the start of all trials, then you should specify how many trials will use it. ANY-maze will then include the period before the first N trials, where 'N' is the number you enter. For example, entering 2 will include the period before the first and second trials only.

The final option when setting up an accustomisation period is to choose whether, when the accustomisation period ends, ANY-maze should automatically start or whether it should wait for you to start the test, either by 'auto-starting' it (i.e. by entering and leaving the camera's field of view) or by clicking the button.

For details about actually running tests which include an accustomisation period, see Running tests which include an accustomisation period

Editing an accustomisation

You can make any changes you like to an accustomisation period, including just turning it off, at any time.

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ANY-maze help topic T0406