ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Protocol page > The elements of a protocol > Behaviour > Zones > Setting up a zone > Choosing how ANY-maze should detect entries and exits from a hidden zone
Choosing how ANY-maze should detect entries and exits from a hidden zone
Introduction
All hidden zones include a sub-element in the protocol list called Zone exit settings. Selecting this will display options in the Settings pane that allow you to specify exactly how ANY-maze detects exits from the hidden zone.
| • | Specifying when ANY-maze should consider the animal to have entered a hidden zone |
| • | Specifying when ANY-maze should consider the animal to have exited a hidden zone |
| • | Scoring partial exits from a hidden zone |
| • | Ignoring the apparent hidden zone entry that occurs when an animal starts a test hidden |
| • | Altering hidden zone exit settings |
Specifying when ANY-maze should consider the animal to have entered a hidden zone
When an animal enters a hidden zone it will become progressively less visible to the system, in effect it will seem to get smaller and smaller. You can control when ANY-maze will consider the animal to have become hidden, by specifying the percentage of its size which must remain visible for it not to be scoring as having entered the hidden zone. For example, if you specify 40% then when only 39% of the animal is still visible, ANY-maze will consider that it has entered the hidden zone. There are a few things to be aware of when setting this value:
| • | If you really want the animal to have become completely hidden then just enter a low value, 10% is usually good. |
| • | If you enter a large value, then ANY-maze may erroneously score hidden zone entries. This can occur if the area of the animal visible to the camera becomes smaller - for example, if the animal rears it will usually look smaller to the camera and if its reduced size is below the percentage you have specified, then ANY-maze will consider the animal to have entered the hidden zone, when of course, it hasn't. |
| • | If your protocol includes multiple hidden zones, then you should enter the same percentage for all of them - if you don't, then ANY-maze will use the smallest entry percentage specified for any zone. |
| • | The entry percentage you specify must be equal to or smaller than the Exit percentage (see next section). This is because, if the entry percentage were larger than the exit percentage, ANY-maze would always score an exit immediately after scoring an entry. In fact it's a good idea to make the entry percentage at least 5% less than the exit percentage. |
 | When you include a hidden zone in a protocol, the Animals protocol element will include a field for you to enter the approximate length of the animals to be tracked. This is necessary because the animals might start a test in the hidden zone, in which case, as ANY-maze will never have seen the animal, it won't know how large it is and therefore the concept of 'a certain percentage of the animal's size' will be meaningless. |
Specifying when ANY-maze should consider the animal to have exited a hidden zone
When an animal exits a hidden zone it will, necessarily, become progressively more visible to the system. In some situations, you might want to consider the animal to have exited the hidden zone as soon as any part of it becomes visible, whereas in other cases you might want to ignore the exit until the entire animal has exited the hidden zone.
To control how ANY-maze detects hidden zone exits, you simply need to specify the amount of the animal that needs to be visible for the system to score an exit. Thus entering a value such as 15% will cause the system to consider that the animal has exited the hidden zone as soon as almost any of it becomes visible, whereas entering 100% will cause the system to wait until the entire animal has become visible before the exit is scored - this latter case means you would ignore partial exits.
Note that the value you enter is used when a test is performed, therefore changing it after a test will not alter how ANY-maze scores the zone exits.
Scoring partial exits from a hidden zone
 | Partial exits can only be scored in tests that were performed using ANY-maze version 7.20 or above. Provided the test was performed with a suitable version, then scoring of partial exits can be switched on after the tests have been performed, i.e. you don't need to have chosen to score partial exits at the time that the test was run. |
Animals will sometimes partially exit a hidden zone, but not exit sufficiently to reach the exit percentage, this sort of behaviour is sometimes called a stretch-attend or a nose-poke.
ANY-maze can score these partial exits from the zone and report how many times they occur and the total amount of time the animal spends partially exited from the zone. To do this you need to check the box Score partial exits from this zone and then specify:
| • | What percentage of the animal must exit the zone for a partial exit to be scored. This must be greater than equal to 5% of its body size and less than the full exit percentage - a value of 10% or 15% is typical. |
| • | Specify the minimum time between partial exits for them to be scored as discrete events. For example, if the animal pokes its nose out of the hidden zone and then does it again a quarter of a second later, you may want to consider this to all be a single partial exit. Entering a time of 250ms or more, would do this; on the other hand entering a time of 100ms would count the two partial exits as separate. You can enter any value from 100ms to 60s - a value of 1s is typical. |
Partial exits are based on the animal length value that you enter in the Animals protocol element, and this size is converted into pixels (which is what ANY-maze actually sees exiting from the hidden zone) based on the ruler line length you specify in the Apparatus protocol element. Therefore for partial exits to be scored correctly, it is imperative that these values are accurately specified.
Ignoring the apparent hidden zone entry that occurs when an animal starts a test hidden
When you start a test, the animal may already be in the hidden zone. In this case, ANY-maze will immediately score an entry into the hidden zone.
However, you might wish to ignore this apparent entry, and only count an entry into the hidden zone when the animal first enters after actually becoming visible. If this is the case in your apparatus, then you should check the box titled Don't score any results in this zone until the first 'true' entry.
NOTE: Because ANY-maze won't count the entry into the zone, it won't consider the animal to be in the zone - therefore it won't update any of the zone's results, including such things as Time in the zone etc. However, it will only ignore these results in relation to the zone, not in relation to the apparatus as a whole, so measures such as Test duration will reflect the animal's time in the hidden zone.
Altering hidden zone exit settings
Unlike almost all other protocol settings, changes to the percentage of the animal which must be visible for an exit from the hidden zone to be scored do not affect tests that have already been performed. Therefore you should endeavour to set this value correctly before performing an experiment.
On the other hand, altering whether ANY-maze scores the apparent hidden zone entry that occurs when an animal starts a test hidden will affect both performed and unperformed tests.
© Copyright 2003-2026 Stoelting Co. All rights reserved
ANY-maze help topic T0329