Home

Welcome to the RodentJoystick wiki! This wiki contains hardware and software documentation for the joystick project at Cornell University's Goldberg Lab.

The lab's goal is to understand the neural mechanisms of motor learning, especially the mechanisms of motor variability. In this experiment, we target mouse forelimb movements as they move a joystick. We set a series of contingencies (e.g. the mouse must hold onto the joystick for 300 ms then move it) and reward mice with a chocolate pellet if they meet the current contingency. We hypothesize that as we change contingencies, the mice will learn to vary their joystick movements.

We built custom joysticks for the mice to use, which include a hall sensor for joystick position, capacitive touch sensors to detect when mice hold onto the joystick, and an IR beam sensor to detect when mice poke their noses into the pellet port. We took stock mouse boxes and machined them to accommodate our hardware. Real-time contingency detection code running on a National Instruments sbRIO 9636 sends a dispense signal to a pellet dispenser whenever a mouse meets the contingency. The 9636 unit also has a front end enabling users to change contingencies without recompiling code. The sbRIO also performs data acquisition, packaging joystick data including the dispense signals, and sending to a host PC.

People involved with this experiment include PI Jesse Goldberg, graduate student Teja Bollu, and undergraduate students Raghav Subramaniam ('15), Nitin Shyamkumar ('17), Nikil Prasad ('17), and lab technician Jackson Walker ('15). ###Experiment Architecture ###Building a Joystick ###Core Analysis ###Data Analysis ###Guidelines for New Analysis Scripts