Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
If you just take one thing from this post, remember that sorting is about noticing. It’s about paying attention. If your child can sit and truly pay attention, she has a superpower. In a world increasingly dominated by screens, where we are entertained rather than challenged, if she can focus on the task at hand and think logically about the choices she makes, she will have a huge advantage. If you would like to focus on 2D shape learning with your child, you could try some of these activities: The RFID tag on the animals collar will make the divider to open the door to the animals designated area. All procedures were conducted in compliance with the European Communities Council Directive 2010/63/EU and under the supervision and with the approval of the animal welfare officer at Humboldt University. Generally, our approach aims to maximize welfare by using undisturbed home-cage-based experimentation. Due to the study’s observational nature, the animals did not experience damage, pain or suffering. Apparatus
One important distinction is whether such a system allows the researcher to group-house animals ( Galsworthy et al., 2005; Knapska et al., 2006; Endo et al., 2011; Dere et al., 2018; de Chaumont et al., 2019) or if it requires the isolation of animals ( Poddar et al., 2013; van Dam et al., 2013; Remmelink et al., 2016, 2017). Careful consideration must always precede the experimental design as group housing can lead to the formation of dominance relationships and aggression and may introduce asymmetric variation if different treatment groups are housed together ( Blanchard et al., 1988; Kappel et al., 2017). Long-term social isolation on the other hand induces negative behavioral changes in rodents ( van Loo et al., 2003; Arndt et al., 2009; Martin and Brown, 2010). Without contraindication group housing is therefore generally viewed as preferable, as it also allows for multiple animals to be tested in one system. Group-housed animals are commonly marked with subcutaneous ID chips (radio frequency identification [RFID] transponders) to allow individual experimentation. Taken together, the results for our home-cage-based system are comparable to those observed in previous conventional experiments. Our system is therefore well suited to study cognitive functions such as learning set formation and cognitive flexibility during reversal learning with the added advantage of a high-throughput automated home-cage-based approach. The sorter was activated from phase two onwards. During training phases, mice were sorted into the operant compartment for between 2 and 9 sessions per day (median 5 sessions) and the operant module was occupied for nearly 14 h per day with mice performing sessions. Mice, especially at the beginning, tended to crowd together in the sorter, which led to the sorting procedure being aborted. Thus, for each successful visit to the operant compartment, a mouse needed an average of 5 entries to the sorter. A mouse completed 122 trials on average per day (98–167 trials). The minimum of 50 trials that were required for each of the training phases three and four were completed within a single day by all mice except one. Odor Pair Discrimination Acquisition and Reversal How do we create a solution to automatically feed farm animals and maintain their health while reducing human intervention?
A child will think, How does this new thing fit into what I already know about the world? Can I put it into one of the existing pigeon holes in my mind? Or do I have to pay attention and investigate further? Eventually your child will learn to sort using Venn and Carroll diagrams they are taught about at school. Is it in the five times table? Is it in the 2 times table? Is it in both? Is it in neither? But before they reach that level of maths, there are plenty of sorting games and activities for pre-schoolers to enjoy at home. The faster and more efficiently you can identify and sort something, the faster you are able to understand it.” In this study, we used an automated olfactory task and a home cage with a group of ID-chipped mice. We then connected the two compartments by an RFID-based animal sorter. This sorter allowed continuous testing throughout the 24-h period by giving mice individual access to the test compartment automatically. Experimental sessions were thus self-initiated and voluntary as well as free from the interference of cagemates. As shown previously, rodents readily adapt to the animal sorting process with minimal sorter training ( Winter and Schaefers, 2011; Rivalan et al., 2017).
With the beginning of the first day of training mice entered the sorter within 5 min after all doors had opened (median = 4.6 min, max. 12 min). For the rest of the first day, still without sorter functionality but with doors always open, mice entered the operant compartment and made an average of 180 individual head entries, collecting 2.7 ml (mean) of water.Over the past 50 years, meat production has more than tripled. The world now produces more than 340 million tonnes of meat each year. One of the new features that allowed mice in our setup to complete several training phases or test stages within a single day was the introduction of performance-based advancement in the experimental schedule not only within a day but also within a session. This automated progression through the stages reduced the median completion time by 3 days across the 20-day study, an advantage that is only expected to become more pronounced with longer discrimination series. In addition, immediate performance-based advancements prevent overtraining at any given stage. This is relevant since overtraining affects measures of cognitive flexibility, such as reversal learning and attentional set shifting ( Capaldi and Stevenson, 1957; Brookshire et al., 1961; Garner et al., 2006; Dhawan et al., 2019), and differences due to varying overtraining can be misinterpreted as differences in cognitive flexibility across the individuals. Especially in a home-cage-based setting in which the degree of overtraining could vary massively between animals that reach criterion during the first or last session of a day, we believe that automated performance-based advancement is essential. Twelve C57BL/6JRj male mice (Charles River, Germany) aged 8 weeks were housed in groups of six in standard EU type III cages (43 × 27 × 18 cm). Prior to study onset, they have received biocompatible RFID transponders (12.1 mm × 2.1 mm, Sokymat, Switzerland). Animals were kept on a 12 h light/12 h dark cycle at 23 ± 2°C and 45–55% rel. humidity in the experimental chamber, to which they were transferred 6 days prior to the start of the experiment for chamber habituation. Experiments were carried out with two groups of six animals in succession. Maintenance chow (V1535, Ssniff, Germany) was provided ad libitum throughout the experiment. During the chamber habituation period, water was provided from a bottle in the home cage. During the experimental phase, water was provided from the liquid feeder in the operant chamber. Water consumption was monitored daily, and mice that had drunk less than 1 ml received 30 min of access to a water bottle in a separate home cage. Furthermore, a daily visual inspection was performed on all mice. Ethics you may sometimes hear these skills called Bloom’s taxonomy, after the man who devised the classification. This kind of pattern-recognition really speeds learning up. The faster and more efficiently you can identify and sort something, the faster you are able to understand it.
Twinkl Kids TV or Twinkl Parents have many educational videos on various aspects of the school curriculum. One of the reasons those pom-pom games are so boring is that they drag on far longer than is necessary. Either you know your colours or you don’t. Adding the tenth pom-pom to the bowl proves nothing. If you can match correctly, you’ll get the first one right and the rest is superfluous.Not everyone puts their baby into a shapes and colours bootcamp, but it’s perfectly normal for an 18-month-old to do all of the above. Be guided by your child but as a rule, by three, sorting by colour should come quite naturally. Best sorting toys for toddlers Print and cut out these farm animals and the shape pieces to create a fun puzzle. Encourage your child to match the shapes with those on the animals’ bodies. You may wish to laminate the various animals and shapes to make them more durable and so that you can reuse them again. How can I teach my child about 2D shapes? Later, when they are able to sit up and grasp, you can present your baby with a variety of objects to choose from. A treasure basket is perfect for this. Learning how to sound out animal names phonically is a key educational skill which your little learners will need throughout their lives. Use our phonic puzzle to teach kids the English alphabet, how to spell a variety of words and develop phonics skills. Use our girls and boys toys to sequence alphabet letters correctly and teach them their favourite animal's names with this Montessori toy. The sequence of odor pairs and the initial S+ odor werepseudo-randomly assigned to the mice for counterbalancing. We firstcreated a 4 × 4 Latin square for all odor pairs across thenumber of discriminations and then replicated this Latin square withcontingencies reversed between S+ and S-. Therefore, if an animal had S+ anisole during the third initial acquisition, another animal had S+ eugenol during the third initial acquisition (from the anisole/eugenol pair). As we had 12 subjects, we needed two additional random sequences and their counter-balanced sequences. As one mouse that did not learn was excluded from the analysis, the data shown are for 11 mice. Both the initial acquisition and reversal stages ended when performance reached the criterion of 85% correct responses in 20 consecutive trials. The experimental switch to the next stage (reversal or next odor pair) occurred within ongoing sessions. We implemented this performance-based stage switching in the experimental control software so that it occurred automatically. Otherwise, as commonly done, a mouse could have advanced to the next experimental stage only on the next experimental day. This would have significantly extended the duration of the whole experiment. Also, maintaining training after the criterion is reached could lead to overtraining which may impact later training stages. The experiment ended for a mouse when it had completed all eight stages of odor discrimination learning and reversal. After finishing the experiment, the mouse stayed in the system and was re-started on its discrimination series until all the other mice had completed the experiment. Odors
Bowls and balls | Even easier than a shape sorter, balls and matching bowls are the perfect entry point to sorting, though at this age the focus is more on motor control and matching.Without it, no other learning would be possible. It’s the most fundamental skill. Pre-schoolers love to play it. You’ll find it in every children’s magazine. We tend to underestimate how young our children learn to identify colours. Many of us give our children colour matching games to play but if your child shows no interest in sorting pom-poms into primary-coloured bowls at 30 months, it might simply be that they mastered this kind of task years ago. Just because they don’t have the words to name colours doesn’t mean they can’t complete the activity. The same is true for shapes. One advantage both systems offer is the prevention of cagemate interference during task performance. While in the AutonoMouse setup a rush of several mice resulted on rare occasions in the entrance of more than one mouse before the door closed, this was never observed in our system due to the verification period during the sorting process. The elimination of cagemate interference is important since it can affect the behavior of a mouse during task performance. Apart from disturbing an animal and drawing attention away from the task, social interference can modulate learning and memory ( Knapska et al., 2010; Nowak et al., 2013), though this effect has mainly been studied in fear-conditioning paradigms. Furthermore, social interference can influence access to the operant module, especially if there are large differences in dominance, if there are many animals per operant module or if there is increased aggression between cagemates (e.g., due to genotype) ( Nelson and Chiavegatto, 2000; Endo et al., 2012). Where hierarchies and competition might affect or bias results, individuals or treatment groups could still be kept separate in multiple independent home cages with multiple sorters connecting these to one jointly used operant system.
Great Deal 
New Comment