Acquire EthoVision Experiment command

Noldus™ EthoVision and Wintrack store experimental data in different ways. In Wintrack, the unit of storage is the case document which contains all data belonging to a particular animal. Noldus™ EthoVision stores indiviual, sequentially numbered track files. The Acquire EthoVision Experiment command converts a whole Noldus™ EthoVision 2.3 experiment into a corresponding set of Wintrack case documents. Backward compatibility is provided for EthoVision DOS versions 1.52-1.96.

How to acquire an EthoVision experiment...

1. Before running the trials, create a Noldus™ EthoVision experiment. Consult the EthoVision user manual if you are not sure how to handle EthoVision experiments.
2. The experiment should contain the following independent variables:
   • A variable called name (character type) which for every track will indicate the name of the animal to which the track belongs. Because this name will be used by Wintrack to name the corresponding case document, it must comply with Windows™ file naming conventions.
   • A variable called trial (numeric type) for specification of the trial sequence number of every track. Can be omitted if all animals in the experiment have only one trial.
   • A variable called goal (character type) will specify the goal position for each track. The type of arena used for the experiment determines which codes are allowed. The codes are identical to those used in the goal position field of the Acquire Trial dialog: CT, NW, NE, SE, or SW in the Morris water maze - B01-B40 in the Barnes maze. NO must be specified if there is no goal (probe trials, open field). You may leave this variable blank if the goal position has not changed since the last track was recorded. You may omit it altogether if you plan to specify the goal position information using a custom setup file or if none of the trials has a goal.
   • If you specify the goal position information using a custom setup file and plan to use different versions of the custom setup, you must define a variable called version (numeric type). This variable must then be assigned the proper version number for the first trial of every animal, but can be left blank for all subsequent trials.
   • EthoVision 2.3 does not permit to erase tracks once they have been saved to disk. If one or more tracks were recorded in but should not be imported into Wintrack, define an additional variable comment (character type) and enter ignore for all tracks that Wintrack should ignore. Wintrack will automatically ignore all tracks that have the EthoVision system variable status set to skipped or planned. When importing from EthoVision DOS, you should delete all tracks that must not be imported.
3. Acquire the complete experiment with the Noldus™ EthoVision soft- and hardware. When importing from EthoVision 2.3, Wintrack will collect data from the original workspace locations and place the resulting case documents in the folder where the EthoVision workspace file (.EWS) resides. By contrast, before importing from EthoVision DOS, the EthoVision experiment file (.EXP), the independent variable value file (.IVV - only with versions 1.80 and later), the arena file (.ARN), and all track files must first be copied to to the same directory.

How to transfer the acquired experiment to Wintrack...

1. Select Import/Acquire > Acquire EthoVision Experiment from Wintrack's File Menu.
2. The Acquire EthoVision Experiment dialog appears. Press the Help button if you need instructions on how to fill in the dialog box fields. Fill in the fields that are not grayed or accept defaults and press Ok to continue. Or press Cancel to abort.
3. Wintrack first reads the EthoVision experiment information and creates a scrollsheet called Tracks which lists all the tracks of the experiment, grouped by case and then sorted by trial:
   • The first four columns list the values of the independent variables name, trial, goal, and version. Wintrack displays all values found in the EthoVision experiment, as well as those it has supplemented for fields which were left blank.
   • The next two columns list EthoVision track numbers and the duration of the corresponding track.
   • The following six columns list the date and time of the beginning of each track.
   • The second last column is labeled comment. It contains a description of any problem found with a particular tract or is empty if Wintrack did not find any problems.
   • The last column is labeled file and lists EthoVision track file numbers. These may differ from track numbers if tracks have been deleted from a EthoVision DOS experiment.
4. If there are no problems with the tracks, Wintrack converts the whole Noldus™ EthoVision experiment into a corresponding set of Wintrack case documents. Missing or out of range trials do not prevent Wintrack from completing the conversion and can be suppressed by specifying a range of trials at which the experiment may resume after scheduled gaps in the trial sequence, e.g. in training to criterion schedules. However, if Wintrack finds any duplicated or orphan trials, it does not import any of the tracks. Instead, it creates an additional scrollsheet called Errors, summarizing all tracks that caused problems, sorted by track number. It reports on the following problems:
   • "out of range" marks trials which lie outside the trial range defined by most other cases in the experiment.
   • If Wintrack finds gaps in the trial sequence of a particular case, it marks the trials flanking the gap with "gap ahead" and "gap behind", respectively.
   • "orphan" trials are most often the consequence of misspelling a case name during recording of a trial.
   • If Wintrack finds duplicated trials, it marks the first one by "duplicate ahead" and the second one by "duplicate behind".
   • The last trial of any particular case, whose trial sequence ends earlier than the sequences of most other cases in the experiment, will be marked "truncation ahead". Similarly, "truncation behind" marks the first trial of any case whose trial sequence is suspected to begin late.
5. Finally, when done processing the Noldus™ EthoVision files, Wintrack displays a summary scrollsheet called Cases which lists the names of all imported cases, the number of trials imported for each case, and the first and last trial of each case.

Note 1: merging EthoVision experiments

Provided that you include a trial variable, you can distribute tracks that belong to the same case over several EthoVision experiments, e.g. trials 1-10 of every case in the first experiment and trials 11-20 in a second one. This may be necessary in large experiments recorded using EthoVision DOS which could not manage more than 930 tracks in a single experiment. You can acquire groups of related EthoVision DOS experiments in any order, provided that you:

• refer to the same case using the same name in all the experiments,
• copy all the experiments to a single directory before importing them,
• specify case properties in the Acquire EthoVision Experiment dialog to accommodate all the trials, not only those of the single experiment you are about to acquire.

If you follow these rules, Wintrack will create all the necessary case documents while processing the first experiment file and then successively reopen the documents to add the trials provided by the subsequent experiment files.

Note 2: importing data from the EthoVision event recorder

If you recorded additional behaviors using the EthoVision manual event recorder, Wintrack can add up to 13 behaviors to the case data as independent binary events, mapped to event keys F1-F12 and Spacebar. When importing from EthoVision 2.3, the selection of behaviors to import and their mapping to Wintrack event keys are specified using the key map for start/stop behaviors and key map for mutually exclusive behaviors fields in the Acquire EthoVision Experiment dialog, or the correpsponding parameters of the Acquire EthoVision Experiment statement. From EthoVision DOS, behaviors are imported automatically and mapped to event keys based on the order in which they appear in the EthoVision Event Recorder > Behaviors list. Selection and mapping cannot be changed during import from EthoVision DOS.

If behaviors are imported along with xy data, Wintrack will handle samples with missing/undetected object in a different way than normally. Without event data, data samples with missing coordinates are skipped during import. As soon as event data have to be imported, however, no samples are skipped and the most recently imported valid coordinates are repeated as necessary to substitute for missing coordinates. In this case, Wintrack uses the Alt key event channel to indicate which samples had missing position coordinates. If you want to force Wintrack to handle missing coordinates in this way when importing data from an EthoVision 2.3 experiment that has no events recorded, simply specify missing=Alt in the key map for mutually exclusive behaviors field of the Acquire EthoVision Experiment dialog, or using the correpsponding parameter of the Acquire EthoVision Experiment statement.

Note 3: importing object surface area

Along with xy coordinates and time stamps of EthoVision 2.3 experiments, Wintrack also imports object surface area for each data point and places the values in supplemental data stream 1. A scaling factor can be specified manually. Object surface area can also be imported from EthoVision DOS, but only as pixels and together with manually recorded behaviors.

Note 4: EthoVision arenas

Noldus EthoVision can monitor up to 16 independent arenas simultaneously. With EthoVision 1.95 and later, Wintrack supports this option provided that the arenas have non-overlapping bounding rectangles. EthoVision arenas may be defined by a combination of several Ellipse, Polyline or Rectangle shapes. No matter whether there are multiple arenas or not, Wintrack always expects a single shape that defines the bounding rectangle of the whole arena. Additional shapes may then clip off or cut out parts of that arena. In the arena (.ARN) file of EthoVision DOS, the Ellipse, Polyline or Rectangle statement that defines the bounding rectangle must precede all other statements referring to the same arena.

Note 5: Calendar time

When importing Noldus Ethovision tracks, Wintrack extracts recording date and time of day and stores this information as GMT calendar time (seconds elapsed since 1.1.1970 00:00:00) for later use in analyses. For this information to be correct, clock and time zone must be set accurately on the recording PC. In addtition, local time and date of the recording are incorporated into the trial note.

Related commands...

Use the Open Case command to open the imported case documents. Use the Maze Properties command to control scaling and change the appearance and position of the fields displayed in the case window. The Print Case command lets you print case documents on the current printer or copy them to the clipboard as graphics. Using the Transform Path command you can apply various geometric transformation to the path data of case documents

Additional information...

• See Acquire EthoVision Experiment dialog for details on the associated dialog boxes.
• The related macro statement is explained in Acquire EthoVision Experiment statement.
• There is a toolbar shortcut to acquire an EthoVision experiment.
• Inside case documents provides advanced information on case documents.
• Consult Creating and using macros to learn how to use and create macros.
• Keyboard Shortcuts gives an overview on keyboard shortcuts.
• Using the Wintrack toolbar gives an overview of toolbar shortcuts.