The Animal Behavior Monitoring Chamber

This chamber was originally designed by the National Institutes of Health and was validated as a paradigm for testing the anxiety level in mice¹. The chamber is divided into two sections: a light side and a dark side. A single mouse is placed in the light side of the chamber. The assumption is that if the mouse has a high level of anxiety, it will move quickly from the light to dark side of the chamber to escape the bright light. The motility of the mouse can also be used as an indicator of anxiety level and can be measured by counting the number of times the mouse makes a transition from one side of the chamber to the other. The time it takes for the mouse to make the first light to dark transition and the total number of transitions made during a specified time are recorded. These can then be analyzed to determine anxiety levels. 
The previous design used a microprocessor to control each animal monitoring chamber. The results were displayed at the end of the run and had to be recorded manually for future analysis. Our new design takes advantage of desk-top PCs for data acquisition and storage. Each PC can run up to four Animal Behavior Monitoring Chambers concurrently. Data are stored on the hard disk of the PC, alleviating the need for manual recording of experimental results. Now the researcher can run several trial at once, and the results are recorded automatically and are ready for analysis in a spreadsheet of the user's choosing. 

¹ Crawley, J. and Goodwin, F. K. Preliminary Report of a Simple Animal Behavior Model for the Anxiolytic Effects of Benzodiazepines. Pharmacology Biochemistry & Behavior, Vol. 13, pp 167-170. 1980.