Date: Thursday, August 28
Time: 09:30-12:30
Location: Auditorium
Chair: Leonie de Visser (Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands)

Minimal human intervention, handling and transport; undisturbed and continuous behavioural recordings; measurements of long-term and circadian processes. These advantages have made the home cage increasingly popular and acknowledged as testing environment for behavioural phenotyping purposes. Flanked by an upsurge in the number of automated home cage recording systems available on the market, the home cage is more often becoming implemented in behavioural assays and test batteries. Measuring activity under baseline conditions in the home cage facilitates the interpretation of outcomes from other, novel environment tests. However, the home cage can be equipped to serve as a testing environment for an extended number of behavioural domains, such as anxiety and cognition. This symposium presents the most recent innovations and applications in the field of home cage studies. The program is aimed at addressing different types of automated home cage systems that each have their specific methodology suitable for answering the specific questions of their users. Moreover, the symposium will focus on a variety of behavioural domains, such as locomotor activity, emotional learning, operant conditioning and anxiety. The assessment of home cage behaviour presented here is implemented in neurobiological studies combined with genetic strategies and specific disease-related research.

Program

• 09:30 Fully Automated 24/7 Behavioral Screening for Mutations in Targeted Cognitive Mechanisms in the Mouse
  C.R. Gallistel, A.P. King, A.M. Daniel, E.B. Papachristos, and F. Balci (Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA)
  

• 09:50 Learning (in) the PhenoTyper: an integrative approach to conducting cognitive behavioral challenges in a home cage environment
  R.C. de Heer, M.Schenke, W.W. Kuurman, and B.M. Spruijt (Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands)
  

• 10:10 Differential involvement of the central amygdala in appetitive versus aversive learning in mice trained in the IntelliCage system
  E. Knapska¹, F. Neuhäusser-Wespy², H.P. Lipp, L. Kaczmarek¹, and T.Werka¹
  (¹Nencki Institute, Warsaw, Poland; ²University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland)
  

• 10:30 Genetic dissection of motor activity and anxiety-related behaviors in mice using an automated home cage task
  Martien J.H. Kas¹, Berend Olivier² and Annetrude J.G. de Mooij-van Malsen¹
  (¹UMC Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands; ²Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands)
  

• 10:50 Coffee break
  

• 11:30 Home cage testing of impulsivity
  S. Koot¹,², W. Adriani¹, R. van den Bos², and G. Laviola¹
  (¹Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Roma, Italy; ²Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
  

• 11:50 Role of home cage studies in epilepsy research
  Paolo Fabene (University of Verona, Verona, Italy)
  

• 12:10 The PhenoTyper automated home cage environment as a high throughput tool to detect behavioral abnormalities of mutant mice
  M. Loos (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
  

• 12:30 End of session

The information displayed above is preliminary and can therefore change.