Neuropixels 2.0: A miniaturized high-density probe for stable, long-term brain recordings.

Measuring the dynamics of neural processing across time scales requires following the spiking of thousands of individual neurons over milliseconds and months. To address this need, we introduce the Neuropixels 2.0 probe together with newly designed analysis algorithms. The probe has more than 5000 sites and is miniaturized to facilitate chronic implants in small mammals and recording during unrestrained behavior. High-quality recordings over long time scales were reliably obtained in mice and rats in six laboratories. Improved site density and arrangement combined with newly created data processing methods enable automatic post hoc correction for brain movements, allowing recording from the same neurons for more than 2 months. These probes and algorithms enable stable recordings from thousands of sites during free behavior, even in small animals such as mice.

Rigbox: An Open-Source Toolbox for Probing Neurons and Behavior.

Setting up an experiment in behavioral neuroscience is a complex process that is often managed with ad hoc solutions. To streamline this process, we developed Rigbox, a high-performance, open-source software toolbox that facilitates a modular approach to designing experiments (https://github.com/cortex-lab/Rigbox). Rigbox simplifies hardware input-output, time aligns datastreams from multiple sources, communicates with remote databases, and implements visual and auditory stimuli presentation. Its main submodule, Signals, allows intuitive programming of behavioral tasks. Here we illustrate its function with the following two interactive examples: a human psychophysics experiment, and the game of Pong. We give an overview of running experiments in Rigbox, provide benchmarks, and conclude with a discussion on the extensibility of the software and comparisons with similar toolboxes. Rigbox runs in MATLAB, with Java components to handle network communication, and a C library to boost performance.