The 5/9 holes box is commonly used to evaluate attention performance using a visual discrimination task in laboratory animals.

The Panlab 5/9 holes box is composed by a test chamber, food or drink dispenser, a Link Box to connect it to the PC and the PackWin software. The particularity of the Panlab box is that 9 holes positions are available for the test providing an higher protocol flexibility: different number of holes used, different degrees of test difficulty.

The 5/9 holes box is assembled with black aluminium walls and a transparent front door. The box is equipped with an arc of 9 contiguous apertures set into the rear wall, a house light, a food pellet dispenser and photobeams to detect the nose-pokes into the food holder. The holes not used in the experiment may be blocked up using a metal insert. Each hole is equipped with photocell beams and internal LED providing visual cues specific to each hole. The intensity of the LED can be adjusted in Link Box using the digital selector. The box is placed on a stainless-steel platform and the associated tray is easily removable to clean animal excrements.

All Panlab five hole boxes are associated with the potent and versatile PackWin software in order to control the experiment (protocol configuration, experiment running) and obtain relevant data such as correct responses, incorrect responses, omissions, premature responses, perseverance responses, time out responses, total receptacle head entries, etc.

Different experimental paradigms for sustained attention, animal models of impulsive behaviour and lateralized-discrimination task can be conducted using the nine-hole box.

The 5-choice serial reaction time task (5CSRT task) is a task currently used in this kind of boxes. A specific Packwin software module is available for ready-to-use configurations, Run panel and Data reports directly targeted to 5-choice serial reaction tasks.

SHUTAVOID software is an implemented version of the Panlab SHUTTLE-8 software offering a user-friendly interface to conduct active and passive avoidance procedures in an automated manner. 

The Software SHUTAVOID controls independently up to 8 Shuttle Boxes or Passive Cages. The software detects how many cages are physically present and activates the corresponding windows. The system includes a test mode to enables immediate and reliable checking of the functioning of all the elements of the experimental chamber. 

The program controls the presentation of visual and acoustic stimuli and shock duration, at the same time that it records the position of the experimental animal in each compartment of the experimental cage, deciding about stimuli presentation accordingly. 

Unlimited number of schedules can be defined and used either by common or different experimental cages. The protocol editor allows the configuration of all the basic parameters necessary to set an active and passive avoidance experiment: habituation period, duration of the inter-trial interval (fixed or randomized), activation and duration of the conditioned stimulus (light, sound or both), activation, latency and duration of the unconditioned stimulus (electrical shock), latency for considering the response as “null”, door status (open/closed), number of trials, cut-off time for response etc… 

The chambers can be defined as Independent (for classical active avoidance procedures), Master or Slaves (for yoked procedures in which the paired-yoked animals receive the same number and temporal pattern of stimuli as their master mates, but only the master animal controls the outcome of the response). 

The program runs automatically when the animal is detected in the cage (independently for each cage). During the acquisition of data, information about the protocol state, animal position and current data can be visualized for each cage on the corresponding control window. 

Data related to each of the observed animal responses are stored into result files that pick up the information acquired during the working session. The data files can be open and re-analyzed to generate ASCII-coded reports in which the information is summarized for each trial or groups of trials (user-defined).