Open Collections

Modara, Gelareh

University of British Columbia

Touchscreen-based cognitive testing has become a popular tool for assessing a wide spectrum of neuropsychological functions in both human and animal models. Specifically, rodent touchscreen paradigms were pioneered in the 1990s and have undergone significant refinement, with modern commercial systems—such as the Bussey-Saksida system—offering advanced features and greater standardization. Commercially available rodent touchscreen chambers have become very popular tools, benefiting from consistent hardware, software, and training protocols. These systems offer many advantages, including automated data collection, high throughput, strong translatability, and improved standardization across studies—contributing to more replicable and reliable outcomes. However, their high cost presents a significant financial barrier to widespread adoption. Recent open-source initiatives address these limitations by leveraging affordable components (e.g., Raspberry Pi, Arduino) and publicly shared designs and software. Projects such as the ArduiPod Box, the Raspberry Pi touchscreen operant chamber, and Visiomode illustrate different approaches to creating cost-efficient, customizable systems. Despite offering substantial financial and design flexibility, these setups often face their own challenges, including limited user interfaces, data handling constraints, and incomplete hardware documentation. Consequently, there remains a need for an open-source solution that combines user-friendliness, robustness, scalability, and aesthetic appeal while maintaining affordability. Therefore, we developed a customizable, cost-efficient (approximately $500) cognitive touchscreen chamber called NC4Touch for mouse and rat behavioral experiments. It features capacitive touchscreens alongside a feeding port, allowing straightforward training for tasks such as visual pairwise discrimination. Moreover, the user-friendly graphical interface provides real-time control and customization of tasks, supports video recording, and includes robust data management features. We validated the chamber’s operational efficiency and refined training protocols for pairwise visual discrimination tasks in multiple cohorts of rodents. Constructed using readily available microcontrollers, hobbyist-grade hardware, and a custom-built housing, this open-source apparatus offers an accessible solution comparable in performance to commercial systems. Its semi-modular design allows users to modify both hardware and software for various tasks, ranging from basic stimulus-response assays to complex visual discrimination paradigms.

Text

2025-04-24

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90759

Biomedical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/