Open stevewds opened 5 months ago
@stevewds thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.
While I see your use case I don't think StimulusPurpose should be registered in form of a controlled term, because there are simply too many of them.
However we will take this issue into consideration for a schema discussion around behavioral protocols and our stimulation submodule which we plan to optimize/extend in the near future.
We'll keep this issue open for discussion purposes.
Hi all -
Our NDI team was discussing today whether it makes sense to add a new controlledTerm called
StimulusPurpose
.The idea is to allow the user to specify the reason or purpose that a particular stimulus was applied. I can give you an example that illustrates the need we have.
My research group is currently measuring receptive fields in a set of animals using several bouts of stimulation. Here is a list, for example:
I want my analysis code to be able to understand where I was trying to measure direction tuning in the best way, where I was trying to measure spatial frequency tuning in the best way, where I was trying to measure ocular dominance, etc. Although we have encoded complete metadata for the stimuli that were run (about 20 parameters for each grating in each set), we still have to point our analysis code at specific bouts of stimulation, and I want to be able to express that in metadata as well.
As an example, suppose I wanted to tell my code to use epoch
t00001
as the place to make a conclusion about the direction tuning for those cells. I can't just search for where the direction of the grating was varied, as this is true fort00001
,t00002
,t00003
,t00004
,t00005
, andt00006
. Instead, I know (as the experimenter) that I want it to analyze the stimulus where spatial frequency and direction were both co-varied, so I can get a good assessment of direction selectivity for cells that like big objects or small objects.We were thinking that a
StimulusPurpose
controlled term might be a good way to do this. For example, a little ontology might be:One could make an instance of
StimulusPurpose
that applies to several of these stimulation bouts.One might ask, why not just use
StimulusApproach
to encode these purposes? One could, but it might be better to have a new term that reflects the category of information being specified. Here's an example whereStimulusApproach
andStimulusPurpose
might differ.In bouts
t00004-6
, we assess ocular dominance with a shorter stimulus suite that only varies in direction of motion. We would apply theStimulusPurpose
ofAssessing ocular dominance or binocular matching
to all oft00004
,t00005
, andt00006
, and then apply theStimulusApproach
ofLeft eye view blocked
tot00004
andRight eye view blocked
tot00005
. One conveys more information about what was literally done, the purpose describes why.The purpose information would make it easier to write automated analysis code across multiple studies.
We are curious for your thoughts!
Best Steve and NDI team