This is a Matlab program written to investigate unilateral neglect in a pre-clinical animal model of stroke. Unilateral neglect is often observed in stroke survivors. It is a condition in which a person fails to "recognize" what is present or what is happening on one side of their body (whether in their visual field or in another sensory modality).

We determined to investigate unilateral neglect in rats by presenting a visual stimulus on either the left or right side of the body, and then observing whether the rats would react to the stimulus. Rats were first trained to recognize each stimulus and were given a food reward on successful trials. We then tested impairments in their ability to respond to each presented stimulus after an experimental ischemic injury to parietal cortex.

This program is written in Matlab. It interfaces with an Arduino board using serial communication, and the Arduino board collects data from the various sensors used in the experiment. The code running on the Arduino board is not included in this repository. Only the Matlab code is included here.