Telemetry provides a useful way of acquiring physiological data, while still allowing the animal to display natural behavior. As opposed to an external measuring instrument attached to the animal, an internal transmitter is much less intruding on the freedom of movement of the animal.

The coding scheme determines what data you collect and is, thus, an essential part of your behavioral study. Setting up a coding scheme is not as straightforward as it may seem. It often requires quite some thinking to define the perfect coding scheme. The Observer XT supports the whole process of refining and re-arranging the coding scheme by allowing you to build your coding scheme during scoring. Also the possibilities to score subjects or comments only and to define (up to ten) hierarchical levels, make that you can arrange your coding scheme any way you like it. This flexibility is one of the key features of The Observer XT.

Observational data are usually organized in discrete elements of varying complexity. In many cases it is important to relate data to variables that represent the context in which the observation takes place, for example the temperature of the room or the age of the subjects. Several of these variables may have different values in the same context, for example different subjects interacting in a room may have different ages. It is therefore important to relate data to such variables defined at different hierarchical levels. The Observer XT offers this possibility by linking subjects and multiple data sets to specific independent variables.

The Observer XT supports playback of most commonly used video file formats, such as various MPEG and AVI formats, DivX and WMV. It is also possible to feed a live video signal into The Observer, through a FireWire or USB connection, and create up to 2 video files (DV-AVI or WMV) in The Observer while carrying out an observation. Depending on the power of your computer, you could create additional video files with an MPEG encoder that can be started/stopped from within The Observer. With our Screen Capture Module you can capture the screen of a test PC in a high-quality video file. This is a wellknown need of usability professionals.

Theme™ is a software package for pattern detection in sequential data. It was originally developed for the analysis of social interactions. Theme uses raw data as input. Theme’s algorithms are based on relationships in the order and timing of behaviors. These relationships are critical in any goal directed action. Thus the time structures detected by Theme often reflect the purpose of behavior.

Rixt van der Veen [Leiden, The Netherlands]

The importance of maternal care in shaping an individual’s phenotype in health and disease is becoming more and more apparent in both human and animal studies. However, in mouse studies using inbred strains or knockout mice to analyze the genetic influences on the development of normal and aberrant behavioral phenotypes, maternal behavior is very poorly characterized and often ignored.

A. Dirks, L. Groenink, M. Verdouw, J. van der Gugten and B. Olivier (Utrecht, The Netherlands)

Exploration of the behavioral consequences of chronic CRH overproduction in mice of two established transgenic lines (CRH-OE2122 and CRH-OE2123) in behavioral paradigms reflecting different aspects of stress, anxiety and depression.

In this study, The Observer and EthoVision allowed easy recording and analysis of specific behaviors, resulting in an extensive description of the behavioral profile of the mutant mice overexpressing CRH.  

Dexamethasone (DEX) is widely used to prevent chronic lung disease in premature born infants. To investigate possible long-term adverse effects of neonatal DEX treatment, the consequences of a DEX treatment protocol in rat neonates on the social behavior of rats was studied. The Observer was used to measure social (play) behavior in juvenile rats, whereas EthoVision was used to assess social activity in adult rats.  Neonatal DEX treatment resulted in enhanced social play behavior in juvenile rats. In contrast, social activity was not altered in adult DEX rats during the social interaction test.