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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2021 Aug 1.
Published in final edited form as: Trends Neurosci. 2020 Jun 22;43(8):581–595. doi: 10.1016/j.tins.2020.05.005

Figure 3, Key Figure. Experimental techniques for investigating sensory processing during freely moving natural behavior.

Figure 3,

A) (1) Miniature head-mounted cameras facing outward and at the eye can measure the visual scene and eye movements to estimate the current visual input. (2) Chemical sensors and/or fluid dynamic modeling can indicate the spatiotemporal distribution of odor concentration, intranasal temperature or pressure measurement can reveal sniffing, and video tracking or head mounted accelerometers can capture active sampling movements. B) Concurrent measurement of neural activity with microelectrodes (1) or miniaturized microscopes permits alignment of neural data with known sensor dynamics and sensory inputs. Optogenetic and chemogenetic protein expression in defined subpopulations (2) allows identification of neuron types in electrophysiology recordings, or manipulation of circuits to test hypotheses about movement-related inputs to sensory areas. C) Continuous behavioral monitoring with markerless video tracking (1) permits alignment of neural and sensory data with body movements. Supervised and unsupervised analyses reveal substructures in behavior (2) that further refine analysis of the relationship between neural activity and sensory input.