Lesson 1 - Opening your first case document

Wintrack is designed for off-line analysis of data recorded from animals in the water maze, Barnes maze, or openfield. It assumes that all trials recorded from a single animal have been stored in a single case document on disk. This lesson shows how to open and manipulate a case document recorded during a water maze experiment in which animals were trained over 5 days with 6 trials per day. Like the following ones, this lesson will use the sample files which you have already copied to your hard disk when installing Wintrack.

Opening a case document...

1. Select Open Case Document from the File Menu.
2. The Open Case Document dialog is displayed. It has several dialog fields. Some are grayed, indicating that you should ignore them. Two of the fields are accessible and require that you make a selection:
   • Press the button of the dialog field labeled case file. A standard Windows™ File Open dialog box is displayed. Use it to select the file SWIM1.WTR in your WINTRACK directory. As you close the standard File Open dialog box by pressing Ok, the complete name and path of the file you selected appears in the field's edit box. You could also type the path and file name directly into the edit box without calling the Windows™ File Open dialog box.
   • In the dialog field Window, click fit to data: Wintrack will automatically fit the document window to the displayed data.
   • Press Ok to close the dialog box.
3. Wintrack loads the file and displays a case window.

   The window consists of square framed trial views, each of which displays the path of one of the case's trials and the arena. You will also notice black or white dots at the center of the arena. These are fields supposed to represent the allowed goal positions and the actual goal, but are not yet positioned correctly. In Wintrack, there are five possible positions for the water maze goal: NE, NW, SW, SE, and center. The case data inside a case document do not specify the exact position coordinates of the goal. They only indicate, for each trial, if it had a goal and if so, which of the five allowed positions had been selected for it. The exact coordinates of NE, NW, SW, SE, and center are handled independently of the individual case documents, as you shall see next.

Setting the arena properties...

1. Select Arena Properties from the Options Menu.
2. The Arena Properties dialog is displayed:
   • Make sure that water maze is selected in the dialog field labeled Type.
   • In the group of fields labeled Size and shape, arena [m] should be set to 1.5 and goal platform [m] to -0.16. The negative sign of the goal platform size tells Wintrack that the platform was square shaped, not round.
   • In the group of fields labeled Position coordinates, you specify the coordinates for the allowed goal positions. The maze center is always 0,0 - but the other positions need to be specified. Enter the following coordinates: 0.27,0.27 for NE, -0.27,0.27 for NW, 0.27,-0.27 for SE, and -0.27,-0.27 for SW. Separate the coordinate number by a comma, but make sure not to put any white spaces between the values.
   • Press Ok to close the dialog box.
3. Wintrack will redraw the case window.

   The empty squares now correctly indicate the allowed goal positions, while the black square in each trial represents the actual goal. The arena properties you have just set will apply to all case documents that you open - until you change them again using the Arena Properties dialog. Even if you quit Wintrack and restart it later, it will remember the arena properties specified during the last session.

   Wintrack's other two predefined arena types allow to use the program for analyzing openfield and Barnes maze experiments. The standard openfield arena contains no fields at all, while the Barnes maze arena lets you arrange multiple holes along the periphery of the maze. But now let us make a printout of the case document.

Printing the case document...

1. Make sure that the document SWIM1.WTR is still open. Select Print Case Document from the File Menu.
2. The Print Case Document dialog is displayed:
   • Make sure that printer is selected in the dialog field labeled Print to.
   • Press the button of the dialog field labeled printer, spooler, and port. A dialog box is displayed that allows you to select a printer and to set its properties. Select a printer and press Ok to return to Wintrack. Name, spooler and port of the selected printer are displayed in the dialog field.
   • In the dialog field Options/Size, check the boxes next to header text, footer text, and trial numbers. Uncheck the box next to scale output. Use the dialog fields width [m] and height [m] to specify an appropriate size for the printed graph.
   • If you wish, you can change the texts proposed in the dialog fields labeled header text and footer text. You may also accept the proposed defaults.
   • Press Ok to close the dialog box.
3. Wintrack will print the case document to the selected printer.

Important note!

All examples in this tutorial use proprietary Wintrack case documents. However, the Open Case Document command also recognizes a number of foreign data formats: data files produced by the ASBA Wild & Leitz™ tracking program BEO, data files produced by the tracking systems HVS Image™ WATER 2020 or Watermaze™ for Windows, and tables stored as tab delimited text (for example the TXT format of MS Excel™). See Inside case documents for details.

Lesson 2 - Setting time windows and zooming - will show you how to zoom in on individual trial views, path segments, and time windows.