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Edited by Donald W. Pfaff, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, and approved January 3, 2011 (received for review October 4, 2010)
Abstract
To obtain a perspective on an animal's own functional world, we study its behavior in situations that allow the animal to regulate the growth rate of its behavior and provide us with the opportunity to quantify its moment-by-moment developmental dynamics. Thus, we are able to show that mouse exploratory behavior consists of sequences of repeated motion: iterative processes that increase in extent and complexity, whose presumed function is a systematic active management of input acquired during the exploration of a novel environment. We use this study to demonstrate our approach to quantifying behavior: targeting aspects of behavior that are shown to be actively managed by the animal, and using measures that are discriminative across strains and treatments and replicable across laboratories.
- Dimensionality Emergence Assay
- dynamics of behavior
- open field test
- phenotyping mouse behavior
- sequences of repeated motion
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ilan99{at}post.tau.ac.il.
Author contributions: Y.B., E.F., and I.G. designed research; E.F., G.Z.H., and I.G. performed research; Y.B. and T.G. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; Y.B., E.F., T.G., and G.Z.H. analyzed data; and Y.B., E.F., T.G., G.Z.H., and I.G. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This paper results from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences, “Quantification of Behavior” held June 11–13, 2010, at the AAAS Building in Washington, DC. The complete program and audio files of most presentations are available on the NAS Web site at www.nasonline.org/quantification.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1014837108/-/DCSupplemental.
Quantifying the buildup in extent and complexity of free exploration in mice
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