After almost a century of use and development, operant chambers remain a significant financial investment for scientists. Small powerful single-board computers such as the Raspberry Pi™ offer researchers a low-cost alternative to expensive operant chambers. In this paper, we describe two new operant chambers, one using nose-poke ports as operanda and another using a touchscreen. To validate the chamber designs, rats learned to perform both visual discrimination and delayed alternation tasks in each chamber. Designs and codes are open source and serve as a starting point for researchers to develop behavioral experiments or educational demonstrations.
Keywords: delayed alternation; nose-poke; operant chamber; rat; touchscreen; visual discrimination.
© 2019 Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior.