Graduate Program in Neuroscience, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A3K7, Canada.
Anatomy and Cell Biology, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A3K7, Canada.
eNeuro. 2021 Jul 9;8(4). doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0032-20.2021. Print 2021 Jul-Aug.
Mammalian orienting behavior consists of coordinated movements of the eyes, head, pinnae, vibrissae, or body to attend to an external stimulus. The present study aimed to develop a novel operant task using a touch-screen system to measure spatial attention. In this task, rats were trained to nose-poke a light stimulus presented in one of three locations. The stimulus was presented more frequently in the center location to develop spatial attention bias toward the center stimulus. Changes in orienting responses were detected by measuring the animals' response accuracy and latency to stimuli at the lateral locations, following reversible unilateral chemogenetic inactivation of the superior colliculus (SC). Additionally, spontaneous turning and rotation behavior was measured using an open-field test (OFT). Our results show that right SC inactivation significantly increased the whole body turn angle in the OFT, in line with previous literature that indicated an ipsiversive orientating bias and the presence of contralateral neglect following unilateral SC lesions. In the touch screen orienting task, unilateral SC inactivation significantly increased bias toward the ipsilateral side, as measured by response frequency in various experimental conditions, and a very large left-shift of a respective psychometric function. Our results demonstrate that this novel touchscreen task is able to detect changes in spatial attention and orienting responses because of e.g. experimental manipulations or injury with very high sensitivity, while taking advantage of the touch screen technology that allows for high transferability of the task between labs and for open-source data sharing through https://www.mousebytes.ca.
哺乳动物的定向行为包括眼睛、头部、耳郭、触须或身体的协调运动，以注意外部刺激。本研究旨在开发一种新的操作性任务，使用触摸屏系统来测量空间注意力。在这个任务中，老鼠被训练用鼻子轻敲出现在三个位置之一的光刺激。刺激在中心位置出现的频率更高，以培养对中心刺激的空间注意力偏向。通过测量动物对侧位置刺激的反应准确性和潜伏期来检测定向反应的变化，随后可逆单侧化学遗传失活上丘（SC）。此外，使用开放式场测试（OFT）测量自发转动和旋转行为。我们的结果表明，右侧 SC 失活显著增加了 OFT 中的整个身体转角，与之前的文献一致，表明单侧 SC 损伤后存在同侧定向偏向和对侧忽略。在触摸屏定向任务中，单侧 SC 失活显著增加了各实验条件下的反应频率所测的偏向同侧的程度，以及相应心理物理函数的非常大的左移。我们的结果表明，由于例如实验操作或损伤，这种新型触摸屏任务能够非常灵敏地检测空间注意力和定向反应的变化，同时利用触摸屏技术，使任务在实验室之间具有很高的可转移性，并通过 https://www.mousebytes.ca 进行开源数据共享。
