David J Barker, Christopher Herrera, Mark O West
BACKGROUND: Ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) have been utilized to infer animals' affective states in multiple research paradigms including animal models of drug abuse, depression, fear or anxiety disorders, Parkinson's disease, and in studying neural substrates of reward processing. Currently, the analysis of USV data is performed manually, and thus is time consuming. NEW METHOD: The goal of the present study was to develop a method for automated USV recognition using a 'template detection' procedure for vocalizations in the 50-kHz range (35-80kHz)...
October 30, 2014: Journal of Neuroscience Methods