ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Protocol page > The elements of a protocol > Behaviour > Zones > Setting up a zone > Specifying whether the animal must be oriented towards a zone to be investigating it

Specifying whether the animal must be oriented towards a zone to be investigating it

In brief

You can optionally specify that for an animal to be considered to be investigating a zone it must be oriented towards the zone. The animal's orientation can be thought of as the direction the animal is facing.

Details

The animal's orientation is defined by a vector connecting the start of the head vector position to the head position. For most animals, excluding quails, the start of the head vector position is the animal's centre. However, in the case of quails, it is a point near the base of the neck, which was determined during tracking. ANY-maze considers the animal to be oriented towards anything that falls within an arc a certain number of degrees either side of this line - see figure 1.

Figure 1. Here the orientation angle is just wide enough for the animal to be considered to be oriented towards the zone.

You can set the orientation angle in the Orientation and movement element of the protocol. By default the total width of the arc is 60° (i.e. 30° either side of the orientation line) but it can be adjusted to anything from 2° (1° either side of the line) to 170°.

When tracking ANY-maze can optionally show the orientation by highlighting the orientation arc, as in figure 2.

Figure 2. The flashlight-like highlighting shows the orientation arc (here the orientation angle was set to 30°).

See also:

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ANY-maze help topic T0331