During a standard random PPI session with trials of: no stimulus, startle only and startle preceded by differents intensity of prepulse is quite comun to get false positives where the latency of the response shows that the response was previous to the startle (mouse/rat is startling by the prepulse).
This results should be taken out for the calculations. Also those results where latency is too late it should be taken way for late calculation.
Why I can no find a single paper where the exclusion criteria is explained? Can anyone help me out ?
Could be important to monitor the cicle of attention. In human with spontaneous blinking, in mouse/rat may be with the cicle of breath/sniff
Hi Rocio,
One approach you can take is to look at the sensor (load cell, piezo, etc) value just prior to the startle stimulus. You can use the root-mean-square (RMS) value of this pre-startle-stimulus window to justify discarding trials where the animal was jumping, grooming, or just moving around prior to the startle stimulus. One example of a criterion for rejection would be to discard trials where the RMS value was more than 3 standard deviations away from the RMS value when you are confident the animal was not moving. A more rigorous statistical outlier detection method may work well.
Hope this helps,
Dan
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