Table 1.

Problem solving.

Problem	Possible Reason	Solution
Incomplete consumption of reward	Animal insufficiently food restricted	Decrease weight as regulations permit
	Animal insufficiently habituated to reward	Provide reward in home cage for additional days
Unstable or poor performance	Low or excessive motivation	Closer attention to weight control; consider temporary feeding separation, according to rate of responding
	Aversion to mask or touchscreen	Increase exploration of the mask and screen by applying food reward on the mask (e.g. peanut butter, pellets or other)
	Excessive fighting in home cage	Monitor home cage and general health of animal, separate if necessary
	Stressors in housing room (e.g. noise)	Make frequent observations of room and cage, move if necessary
	Poor learning ability	Exclusion may be necessary
Abrupt decline in performance and/or trial completion	Touchscreen error (e.g. non-responsiveness, not displaying images)	Check physical connections, clean, run test program (if available), recalibrate, reboot the system
	Reward delivery ceased or inconsistent	Check for physical blockage/disconnection, check for interface error, replace reward dispenser
	Initiation not detected	Clean magazine photobeam, check physical connections, replace if faulty
	Controlling system error (software or hardware)	Check physical connections, reboot the system, change hardware if necessary
Animal appears to make unusually low/high number of beam crosses (Campden only)	Infrared beam failure	Clean infrared beam pathway, check position of infrared switch, replace faulty beams