Video tracking the Habituation/Cross-habituation test

The olfactory habituation/cross-habituation test (HaXha) is a non-invasive spontaneous behavioral task that has been used to study the ability to smell and the capacity to discriminate between stimuli (odors).

The standard means to measure the exploration time is by a human experimenter using a stopwatch. This provides the potential for observer bias in cases where subjects cannot be tested without prior knowledge of status, as when testing anatomically different phenotypes.

Verhagen and Coronas-Samano propose a novel approach to accurately assess HaXha using the EthoVision XT to track the behavior of every animal combined with whole-body plethysmography to non-invasively evaluate their sniffing.