However, it remains a major challenge to quantify naturalistic behaviors in the laboratory in a rapid, reliable, and spatiotemporally precise manner. Popular laboratory assays for memory, decision-making, anxiety and novelty exploration typically require examination of behaviors occurring in particular locations in space or instances in time. Discrete behaviors represent outward manifestations of cognitive and emotional processes.
Editor's evaluationĪ central goal of neuroscience is to discover relationships between neural activity and behavior.
We demonstrate the immediate utility and flexibility of BehaviorDEPOT using popular assays including fear conditioning, decision-making in a T-maze, open field, elevated plus maze, and novel object exploration. Behavioral data is stored framewise for easy alignment with neural data. BehaviorDEPOT also helps researchers develop their own heuristics and incorporate them into the software’s graphical interface. Our freezing detection heuristic achieves above 90% accuracy in videos of mice and rats, including those wearing tethered head-mounts. We provide several hard-coded heuristics. It requires no programming experience and is applicable to a wide range of behaviors and experimental designs. BehaviorDEPOT calculates kinematic and postural statistics from keypoint tracking data and creates heuristics that reliably detect behaviors. We developed BehaviorDEPOT (DEcoding behavior based on POsitional Tracking), a simple, flexible software program that can detect behavior from video timeseries and can analyze the results of experimental assays. However, classifying specific behaviors based on pose data requires additional computational analyses and remains a significant challenge for many groups. Recently, machine learning methods for markerless pose estimation enabled automated tracking of freely moving animals, including in labs with limited coding expertise. Analyses of naturalistic behaviors are often performed by hand or with expensive, inflexible commercial software.
Quantitative descriptions of animal behavior are essential to study the neural substrates of cognitive and emotional processes.
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