A conveyor feeder for animal experiments

Abstract

AbstractSeveral different types of open source feeders have been used in animal experiments in cognitive biology, neuroscience, psychology and related fields. These feeders use either dry pellets, which have hard surface and simple shape, or liquid food types such as sucrose solution. These food types can be rather easily manipulated due to its physical attributes. Although it is beneficial in terms of controllability, animal subjects often lose motivation to interact with operant conditioning devices offering such food items. Using natural food items such as fruits, insects, worms and pieces of meat will be helpful to keep the subject’s motivation high, however, those food items are not very well suited for currently available open source feeders due to its physical attributes, including its complex shape, sticky and delicate texture. We made a feeder to deliver such natural food items to animal subjects for operant conditioning, using relatively cheap and easily obtainable parts. For a validation, we built a full operant conditioning device for wolves and dogs, containing two of these feeders, a pressure-sensitive monitor and a speaker.Specifications table