linking back to brembs.net






My lab:
lab.png
This is preparation number seven in my attempts to establish operant learning in isolated leech ganglia and it's a control preparation, which means I'm just stimulating it every three minutes at ganglion 18 for an hour and a half.

Controls are important, because they tell you what baseline(s) your manipulations should be measured against. In this case, I didn't do anything to the preparation other than observing its responses to the 30 stimulations. For the first ten trials, it responded with a swim/crawl ratio of 7-3. It increased this ratio to 8-1 (one trial was not responded to) in the next ten trials, only to go down to 3-5 (two no-response trials) in the final ten trials. Together with the data from the first no-shock control, this may mean that there is a tendency to bias the decisions away from swimming and towards crawling in these preps. I'll definitely have to do more of these preps and find a way to graph the data properly.

Tomorrow, however, will be the first control where I stimulate the anterior ganglion, but not contingent to any behavior. Instead, the prep will be stimulated according to the stimulation sequence of one of the preceeding preps (a so-called yoked control).
Posted on Thursday 09 September 2010 - 01:47:35 comment: 0
{TAGS}


You must be logged in to make comments on this site - please log in, or if you are not registered click here to signup
Render time: 0.0529 sec, 0.0043 of that for queries.