From Experimental Design to Naturalistic Behavior
Open Lab Online Seminar Series
How do researchers train animals to engage with experimental tasks, interactive technologies, virtual environments, and richer naturalistic paradigms? How can training protocols, behavioral design, and open methods help us study cognition, behavior, and neural activity across species?
This Open Lab Online seminar series brings together researchers developing creative and rigorous approaches to animal training across species. The series highlights how carefully designed training paradigms can open new possibilities for behavioral neuroscience, comparative cognition, enrichment, translational research, and the study of naturalistic behavior.
Rather than focusing only on final results, each seminar will also explore the training process itself: paradigm design, species-specific constraints, practical challenges, troubleshooting, ethical considerations, and the scientific questions enabled by these approaches.
The series will cover a range of methodological themes, including artificial interfaces, touchscreen-based paradigms, virtual and closed-loop environments, naturalistic behavior, social behavior, and other training approaches across animal models.
Format
Each seminar will take place online and will last approximately one hour:
40–45 min talk + 15–20 min discussion
The seminars are open to researchers, students, and anyone interested in behavioral neuroscience, comparative cognition, animal training, open tools, and experimental design across species.
Participants can register separately for each seminar and attend as many sessions as they wish.
Confirmed Programme
From Driving Rats to Wild Brains: Nontraditional Behavioral Approaches in Translational Neuroscience
Kelly Lambert
University of Richmond
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
16:00 CEST / 10:00 EDT
Although traditional laboratory training paradigms and behavioral assessments have provided valuable insights into brain and behavior, they can underestimate the adaptive capacities of animals living in complex environments. In this seminar, Kelly Lambert will discuss a series of nontraditional behavioral training programs and animal models designed to explore experience-based neuroplasticity across diverse contexts. These include extended effort-based reward training to investigate stress resilience, training rats to acquire complex skills such as driving rodent-operated vehicles to assess learning and motivation, and exposing animals to unpredictable positive experiences to examine anticipation and reward. The seminar will also include ongoing work with wild-trapped rats, as well as comparative perspectives from studies involving raccoons in North America and mouse lemurs in Madagascar. Together, these approaches highlight the methodological and conceptual challenges of working across species and environments, while offering new insights into the complex relationships between environments, brains, and behavior.
Registration: Please find the registration form HERE.
Teaching Touchscreens to Animals: Uses and Training for Interspecies Enrichment, Communication, & Research
Jennifer Taylor-O’Connor
Texas A&M University / Parrot Kindergarten
Wednesday, November 4, 2026
16:00 CET / 10:00 EST
Touchscreen devices are increasingly used across a wide range of scientific fields, species, and applied contexts. They can provide animals with new ways to interact with experimental tasks and technologies, with applications spanning research, enrichment, and interspecies communication. In this seminar, Jennifer Taylor-O’Connor will discuss how animals can be trained to interact with touchscreen systems and how these interfaces can be adapted to the perceptual and behavioral characteristics of different species. The talk will cover practical training protocols, species-specific design considerations, and different ways touchscreen interactions can be incorporated into research and enrichment settings. The seminar will also address the ethical considerations involved in designing interactive technologies for animals and how thoughtful interface and training design can support meaningful and appropriate animal participation.
Registration: Please find the registration form HERE.
Virtual reality approaches to study spatial cognitive maps in adult zebrafish
Rainer Friedrich
Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research
Wednesday, November 25, 2026
16:00 CET / 10:00 EST
Brains build internal models of the world that support navigation, understanding, and planning. These internal models are often studied through cognitive maps for spatial navigation, particularly in rodents, but linking functional representations to their underlying circuit mechanisms remains challenging. In this seminar, Rainer Friedrich will present a closed-loop, high-resolution virtual reality approach developed to study spatial cognitive maps in head-fixed adult zebrafish while measuring neuronal activity across the telencephalon. The talk will discuss how different functional neuron types in the zebrafish dorsal telencephalon form internal representations of a virtual environment, how these representations are refined by experience, and how virtual reality manipulations can reveal cognitive inference and prediction. It will also highlight how combining behavioral training, two-photon imaging, and circuit-level approaches in adult zebrafish can help link cognitive maps to their underlying neural organization. Together, these approaches illustrate how virtual environments and the small size of the zebrafish brain can be used to study mechanisms of cognition across scales.
Registration: Please find the registration form HERE.
Virtual Reality for Lab Animal Neuroscience and Behavior
Matthew Isaacson
Cornell University
Wednesday, January 20, 2027
16:00 CET / 10:00 EST
Modern animal-model neuroscience aims both to measure neural activity with increasing spatial and temporal precision and to study neural processes in richer behavioral contexts. These goals can be difficult to combine, since many powerful neural recording methods require head or body fixation and therefore restrict the animal’s behavioral repertoire. In this seminar, Matthew Isaacson will discuss how virtual reality can help bridge this gap by allowing animals to engage in complex and naturalistic behaviors while neural and behavioral activity are precisely monitored. The talk will explore how animals can be trained to interact with custom VR systems designed around the perceptual capabilities of different species. It will also highlight modern open-source VR systems developed for fruit flies, mice, and fish, including systems with high refresh rates, custom displays for species with UV-sensitive photoreceptors, and immersive designs that support naturalistic and innate behavioral repertoires. Together, these approaches illustrate how animal-model VR is opening new frontiers for understanding behavior and the brain.
Registration: Registration will start soon.
Title coming soon
Marieke Schölvinck & Martha Nari Havenith
Ernst Strüngmann Institute / Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience
Wednesday, February 10, 2027
16:00 CET / 10:00 EST
Description coming soon
Registration: Registration will start soon.
More seminars to be announced
Additional seminars will be added to the series, including future talks on naturalistic behavior, social behavior, and other animal training paradigms across species.
Registration is available separately for each seminar. Participants are welcome to register for as many sessions as they wish.
New seminars and registration links will be added to this page as the series develops.