# Important terms in Trial Control

Trial vs. track

A Trial is a single, uninterrupted acquisition session. The trial can be viewed as a container for the data collected in one recording session. It starts when you give the Start command in acquisition and stops when the tracks for all arenas and subjects have stopped.

A Track is the actual recording of a subject's position and behavior. The start of a track may or may not coincide with the start of the trial. This depends on your Trial Control Settings. If you use the default Trial Control Settings, the track starts 1 second after the animal has been detected in the arena and stops when you stop the trial.

Conditions and actions

A Condition is a statement that EthoVision evaluates. A condition can be based on time, presence of the subject in a zone, any variable that quantifies behavior, or the state of a device connected to EthoVision XT.

An Action is a command executed on a variable or a hardware device. You can therefore control your experiment by linking conditions with actions.

example In a Morris water maze test, stop tracking when the rat is detected on the platform (provided that the platform has been defined as a zone). The action is Stop tracking and the condition is Rat detected on the platform. This is represented by the following:

A condition is followed by an action. The condition checks that the animal is in the zone named “Platform”. The action “Stop track” is taken when the condition is met.