Apr 14, 2024
Visually-Guided Reward-Biased Behavioral Task
- Raymond Murray1,
- Helen Schwerdt1,2
- 1Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh;
- 2Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) Collaborative Research Network, Chevy Chase, MD
Protocol Citation: Raymond Murray, Helen Schwerdt 2024. Visually-Guided Reward-Biased Behavioral Task. protocols.io https://dx.doi.org/10.17504/protocols.io.kqdg325eev25/v1
License: This is an open access protocol distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
Protocol status: Working
Created: April 08, 2024
Last Modified: April 14, 2024
Protocol Integer ID: 97920
Abstract
A protocol describing the visually guided, reward-biased saccade task monkeys were trained on in the original study: Schwerdt et al. 2020, Sci. Adv.
Behavioral Task
Behavioral Task
Monkeys performed a programmed eye movement task in which they would first fixate on a central cue displayed on a monitor in front of the them for a fixed duration chosen from a range of 1.2 - 3 s (National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, VCortex).
The central cue would then extinguish while a second target appeared on the screen's periphery, where the monkeys would have to saccade to and fixate for another 4 s before receiving a reward.
Whether the second target appeared to the left or right of the center cue was associated with whether successful completion of a trial would result in either a big or small reward. The second target's location/reward-size association would swap after 15 to 45 trials or 50 to 100 trials.
The reward was a liquid food mixture (355 ml of Plus Nutrition Shake Vanilla, 355 ml of water, blended with two large bananas, and eight biscuits) delivered via a mouthpiece located near the animal's mouth at small and large reward volumes of 1.5 and 2.8 mL or 0.1 and 0.3 mL, respectively.
Monkeys had a large reward probability of either 50% or 25% and an intertrial interval length of a fixed 7.5 s or a fixed value of 5 to 15 s per session. Subjects would perform between 500 and 1200 individual trials per recording session.