Operant Box for Auditory Tasks (OBAT)

Jun 2, 2017

Mariana de Araújo has shared the following regarding OBAT, an operant box designed for auditory tasks developed at the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute of Neuroscience, Santos Dumont Institute, Macaiba, Brazil. 


OBAT is a low cost operant box designed to train small primates in auditory tasks. The device presents auditory stimuli via a MP3 player shield connected to an Arduino Mega 2560 through an intermediate, custom-made shield. It also controls two touch-sensitive bars and a reward delivery system. A Graphical User Interface allows the experimenter to easily set the parameters of the experimental sessions. All board schematics, source code, equipment specification and design are available at GitHub and at the publication. Despite its low cost, OBAT has a high temporal accuracy and reliably sends TTL signals to other equipment. Finally, the device was tested with one marmoset, showing that it can successfully be used to train these animals in an auditory two-choice task.

This research tool was created by your colleagues. Please acknowledge the Principal Investigator, cite the article in which the tool was described, and include an RRID in the Materials and Methods of your future publications. Project portal RRID:SCR_021564; Software RRID:SCR_021604

Read the paper

Read more about OBAT in their paper published in Behavior Research Methods!

Github

All board schematics, source code, equipment specification and design are available at GitHub.

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