Construction of ThermoMaze

Abstract

Physiological changes during awake immobility–related brain states remain one of the great unexplored behavioral states. Controlling periods of awake immobility is challenging because restraining the animal is stressful and is accompanied by altered physiological states. Here, we describe the ThermoMaze, a behavioral paradigm that allows for the collection of large amounts of physiological data while the animal rests at distinct experimenter-determined locations. We found that the paradigm generated long periods of immobility and did not alter the brain temperature. We combined the ThermoMaze with electrophysiology recordings in the CA1 region of the hippocampus and found a location-specific distribution of sharp-wave ripple events. We describe the construction of the ThermoMaze with the intention that it helps enable large-scale data recordings on immobility-related brain states.