PreyTouch: An Automated System for Prey Capture Experiments Using a Touch Screen

The ability to catch prey is crucial for survival and reproduction and is subject to strong natural selection across predators. In many animals, prey capture demands the orchestrated activation of multiple brain regions, demonstrating the intricate interplay between sensory processing, decision-making, and motor execution. This makes prey capture a prime paradigm in neuroscience. Further, its ubiquity across species makes it ideal for comparative research and for studying the evolution of cognition. However, despite recent technological advances in the collection and analysis of behavioral data, experimental approaches for studying prey catch are lagging behind. To bridge this gap, we created PreyTouch - a novel system for performing prey capture experiments on a touch screen. PreyTouch incorporates flexible presentation of prey stimulus, accurate monitoring of predator strikes and automated rewarding. The systems real time processing enables closing the loop between predator movement and prey dynamics for studying predator-prey interactions. Further, the system is optimized for automated long-term experiments and features a web-ui for remote control and monitoring. We successfully validated PreyTouch by conducting long-term prey capture experiments on the lizard Pogona Vitticeps. The acquired data revealed the existence of prey preferences, complex prey attack patterns, and fast learning of prey dynamics. The unique properties offered by PreyTouch combined with the ubiquity of prey capture behaviors across animals establish it as a valuable platform for comparatively studying animal cognition.