Balma Serrano Porcar

Check out the preprint and the system webpage for more details braincircuitsbehaviorlab.github.io/village/inde...

Interested in being a beta tester? Get in touch! ☎️ (🧵10/10)

HUGE THANKS to all the lab members involved, especially Javier Rodríguez, Hernando Martínez, and Caterina Barezzi. And to Alex Taylor, Harsh Vasoya, Donna Kean, and Duncan Pottinger for their amazing work adapting the system for rats🐀 (🧵9/10)

The system brings rodent training to a new level of automation, improving welfare and enhancing reproducibility. If you are tired of spending several hours per day training animals, try it! You’ll never want to train manually again (🧵8/10

Thanks to collaboration with @eknapska.bsky.social and @alicjapuscian.bsky.social, we integrated the TV with the Eco-HAB to monitor home cage activity, and observed that before training, animals sleep💤 and after they eat🧀. Opening new ways to study how ethology interacts with cognition (🧵7/10)

The Training Village is designed to be wrapped around any existing behavioral system without requiring users to change their current task paradigms. We tested it using multiple operant paradigms of varying complexity and observed high task engagement and performance over months (🧵6/10)

Animals used the Training Village very efficiently: they occupied the operant box the majority of the time, coordinated their entrances among them, and quickly progressed across training stages of increasing difficulty (🧵5/10)

The Training Village is designed to be operated remotely. The GUI enables user-friendly monitoring and control of system functions. It also features a Telegram alarm system, allowing users to receive real-time notifications on their phones 📳 and control the system from any remote location (🧵4/10)

In the Training Village, group-housed rodents live in enriched arenas with access to an operant box at any time. The system ensures individualized training using a corridor that connects the home cages with the operant box and contains motorized doors, RFID detectors, and video analysis (🧵3/10)

Since then, together with the help of Rafael Marin and @jrochav.bsky.social guidance, we created the Training Village🐭💡⚙️, an automatic, open-source platform for continuous rodent training in cognitively demanding tasks (🧵2/10)

I am very excited to share my first preprint🎉
The pandemic kicked off strongly during the first year of my PhD, and I had to stop the behavioral experiments when mice were starting to understand the task. At the BCB Lab, this showed us that training automation could be a real game changer (🧵1/10)

🚨Excited to share my first @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social🚨 with the amazing Smith lab, @jbarbosa.org and Albert Compte who made this work possible.

We show that 🐒prefrontal hemispheres combine redundancy (for precision) & weak connections (for capacity) for supporting spatial working memory (WM). 1/🧵

Since no one did it, here is a list of people doing research on working memory. The list is admittedly biased (based on the people I follow), so please help: don't hesitate to let me know of someone missing. I will happily follow and add them to the list!

Please RT🙏

go.bsky.app/8ZsVgMo