Score behaviors manually after acquisition

Aim

To add new or edit existing behavior scores in your trials.

Prerequisites

▪You have defined behaviors in the Manual Scoring Settings.

▪You have acquired one trial and its corresponding video.

Procedure

1.Choose Acquisition > Manual Scoring.

2.Choose the trial, and when it applies, the arena in which you want to score behaviors.

3.To enable the scoring mode, click the Start scoring mode button.

4.Follow one or more of the procedures below.

tip Before editing existing data, click the Save button on the toolbar. This will save a copy of the current behavior scores. In the case you make mistakes when editing, you can always revert to that copy by clicking Undo. For more information, see Saving the track edits.

5.When finished, click the Stop scoring mode button.

To score a behavior with a duration

This applies to behaviors defined as Mutually exclusive and Start-stop. See Define the behaviors that you want to record manually

1.Play the video to the point where the behavior starts.

2.To score the behavior at that point in the video, click the color button with the behavior name at the left side of the plot.

Result: The button is highlighted in red.

3.Play the video forward. As you play the video, a colored bar appears at the left of the hairline.

note If you play the video backward, the color bar is reduced in length.

4.Pause the video where the behavior stops. To score the end of the behavior, click again the button at the left, so it is not highlighted anymore.

5.Repeat steps 1-4 to add more instances of the behavior.

To score a point event

Point events are events with no duration. See Define the behaviors that you want to record manually

1.Play the video to when the behavior occurs.

2.To score the behavior at that point in the video, click the color button with the behavior name at the left side of the plot.

3.Play the video further. The point event is displayed as a vertical segment.

Notes

▪After clicking Start scoring mode button, the video image shows [On] and message next to the button changes to Scoring on.

When you play the video, behavior scores do not change until you click the corresponding button at the left side of the plot.

▪If you want to hide the center point to make the subject more visible, choose Track Visualization or Integrated Visualization or Track Editor, and de-select the body points on the right-hand pane. Next, close and re-open the experiment.

▪When you click the button for a behavior, the name of the behavior is displayed on the video image.

To show/hide and customize this text, choose Show/Hide > Text Features.

▪When you score the start of a behavior (either Mutually exclusive or Start-Stop) and then you reach the end of the trial without scoring the end of the same behavior, that behavior is considered to last until the last sample.

If the behavior is defined as Start-stop, a complementary behavior (“not-behavior”) is added at the end of the behavior you scored. You can see this in the Integrated visualization. The example below shows Grooming and the complementary Not grooming. The plot of distance has been added to visualize the last sample of the track.

This means that the statistics of Not grooming is increased by 1.

▪Behaviors that are defined as Initially Active in the Manual Scoring Settings, are shown as active throughout the trial, if you do not edit them.

For example, No grooming was defined as Initially Active and no behaviors were scored during acquisition. When opening the Manual Scoring screen, the data look like this:

▪If you want to show the arena and zones during the scoring sessions, click the Show/Hide button at the top-left corner, and choose Arena features.