Automated behavioral analysis tool for 3D-maze navigation tasks

A detailed analysis of animal behavior is a crucial step in understanding how the activity of brain structures and individual cells mediate animal behavior. Recent advances in spatial navigation research highlight the need for 3D behavioral paradigms, as traditional 2D mazes cannot fully capture naturalistic behavior in volumetric space. Here we present an extension of the Sphynx software package that enables robust animal 3D trajectory reconstruction. We have shown possibility to extract a wide range of behavioral variables from video recordings of animal behavior in three-dimensional mazes.