A MICROCOMPUTER SYSTEM FOR CONTROLLING CLASSICAL-CONDITIONING EXPERIMENTS

A microcomputer-based laboratory system for controlling stimulus prese ntations and data acquisition in classical conditioning experiments is described. The system comprises an Intel 386/486-based microcomputer and a commercially obtained low-cost counter/timer board with input/ou tput lines for stimulus timing and external device control. A simple, yet versatile custom-designed structured programming language is provi ded for performing an unlimited number of stimulus configurations and their sequences. In electrophysiological studies, the system can be fl exibly connected to computer-controlled signal conditioning systems fo r the amplification and filtering of multiunit and evoked field potent ial response and to high-speed data acquisition systems for sampling a nd analyzing the responses. The costs of reserving an entire microcomp uter for experiment control are well compensated for by the simplicity and efficiency of programming and transportability of the control pro tocols between different setups and laboratories. Furthermore, a data acquisition and analysis system most suitable for the aims of a resear ch project can be selected.