A mini lab tour

Hey there! We're excited that the campaign has been going well. I thought it was time to provide a bit more info on the lab itself. This is just a brief post that will be part 1. More parts will follow soon.

Here's a photo of some of the pigeon boxes (that is, operant chambers) in our lab.

 

We have 8 boxes in all, and you can see boxes 6, 7, and 8 in this photo. Each box is equipped with a touchscreen, its own computer to control it, and a food hopper. Pigeons sold separately. There's also a video camera attached to the back door of each box so we can peak in on the birds while they're performing their task.

Here's a picture of the monitoring station where we can monitor the experiment. We can toggle between all 8 boxes to see what the pigeon is currently seeing on the screen in its respective box. This is showing a screen shot of the task as we will present it to our birds.

 

Meet Bryan! Bryan joined the lab a few months ago, and has been learning how to wrangle pigeons and run the experiments. But, as you can see, he spends most of his time chained to a computer in our control room where we can remotely watch how the birds are doing. We also hang out in this room for lab meetings, to work on our research, analyze data, and of course chat and gossip about life at UCLA! You can see one of our big white boards in the background where we scribble our experiment designs and ideas.

 

Stay tuned for the next installment of life in the Comparative Cognition lab!