An Easily Compatible Eye-tracking System for Freely-moving Small Animals

Measuring eye movement is a fundamental approach in cognitive science as it provides a variety of insightful parameters that reflect brain states such as visual attention and emotions.Combining eye-tracking with multimodal neural recordings or manipulation techniques is beneficial for understanding the neural substrates of cognitive function.Many commercially-available and custom-built systems have been widely applied to awake,head-fixed small animals.However,the existing eyetracking systems used in freely-moving animals are still limited in terms of their compatibility with other devices and of the algorithm used to detect eye movements.Here,we report a novel system that integrates a general-purpose,easily compatible eye-tracking hardware with a robust eye feature-detection algorithm.With ultra-light hardware and a detachable design,the system allows for more implants to be added to the animal's exposed head and has a precise synchronization module to coordinate with other neural implants.Moreover,we systematically compared the performance of existing commonly-used pupil-detection approaches,and demonstrated that the proposed adaptive pupil feature-detection algorithm allows the analysis of more complex and dynamic eye-tracking data in freemoving animals.Synchronized eye-tracking and electroencephalogram recordings,as well as algorithm validation under five noise conditions,suggested that our system is flexibly adaptable and can be combined with a wide range of neural manipulation and recording technologies.