IntelliCage — TSE Systems product page
Vendor: TSE Systems. Automated cognitive & behavioral phenotyping for group-housed mice & rats.
Behavioral data often tell us less about cognition and more about stress.
IntelliCage changes that. It is a fully automated system that allows group-housed mice to perform cognitive and social tasks without human interference.
Using RFID technology one IntelliCage can accommodate and track up to 16 mice or 8 rats while preserving natural social interaction. Its enriched and standardized environment minimizes handling, reduces stress, and delivers highly reproducible data with minimal workload.
To expand experimental control, an intelligent animal gate enables automated conditional access between the IntelliCage and external devices, streamlining workflows without disturbing the animals.
What Makes IntelliCage Unique?
Study Natural Behavior in Social Groups
House up to 16 mice or 8 rats together and collect individual behavioral data without isolation. This enables ecologically valid research and reduces stress-induced variability, thus leading to cleaner, more interpretable results.
Capture Rich Behavioral Data 24/7
Continuous monitoring across light and dark phases provides a complete picture of circadian rhythms, learning trajectories, and spontaneous behavior. This data cannot be captured with short, human-run tests.
Run Established Behavioral Paradigms Automatically
Validated tasks such as spatial learning, reversal learning, fixed ratio, and DRL can be implemented without manual handling. This increases standardization, reduces experimenter bias, and ensures protocol fidelity across studies and sites.
Reduce Labor and Resource Burden
Because animals remain in their home cage and tests run automatically, staff time, handling, and associated variability are dramatically minimized. Multiple paradigms can run in parallel without increasing workload.
Scale Up for High Throughput Screening
Operate up to four IntelliCages on one computer, enabling simultaneous testing of 64 mice or 32 rats. Ideal for phenotyping pipelines, consortium studies, or drug screening where large cohorts are essential.
Tailor Experiments to Your Scientific Question
Flexible, module-based programming allows you to design simple to highly complex behavioral protocols. Researchers can adapt tasks to genotype-specific needs, developmental stages, or intervention studies without hardware changes.
Diverse Behavioral Paradigms
Spontaneous Behavior
Enables unbiased assessment of natural activity, circadian rhythms, and exploration without human interference, providing high ecological validity.
Spatial and Temporal Behavior
Reveals how animals navigate space and structure their daily routines, offering sensitive measures of hippocampal function and cognitive flexibility.
Corner and Spatial Preference Learning
Allows detection of learning strategies and memory retention by quantifying how reliably animals choose or avoid specific locations.
Reversal Learning
Measures cognitive flexibility and adaptability – key readouts for prefrontal cortex function and disease models involving executive deficits.
Patrolling and Sequential Behavior Patterns
Captures complex, self-organized behavioral routines that provide insight into habit formation and procedural memory.
Discrimination Learning (Visual, Spatial, or Fluid Preference)
Determines how effectively animals detect, interpret, and act upon environmental cues, enabling fine-grained analysis of sensory and cognitive processing.
Gustatory Preference and Anhedonia Assessment
Allows automated quantification of reward sensitivity using flavored or sweetened solutions, supporting research in affective disorders.
Social Interaction, Competition, and Hierarchy Analysis
Reveals dominance structures and social strategies in group-housed animals, enabling ethologically meaningful assessments impossible in single-animal tests.
Operant Conditioning (Nosepoke-, LED-, or Door-Controlled Tasks)
Provides precise control over reward and punishment schedules to measure motivation, decision-making, and instrumental learning.
Fixed Ratio Schedules
Evaluates sustained effort, motivation, and motor planning under standardized operant conditions.
Differential Reinforcement of Low Response Rates (DRL)
Tests impulse control and timing accuracy, supporting studies on attention, inhibition, and executive function.
Active and Passive Avoidance Learning
Quantifies learning of aversive contingencies, allowing non-invasive assessment of anxiety-related and avoidance behavior.
Working and Reference Memory Tasks
Tracks how animals process, store, and update information over time, enabling long-term cognitive profiling in disease and intervention studies.
Key facts (from vendor page)
- One IntelliCage: up to 16 mice or 8 rats, individually tracked via RFID; social housing preserved; minimised handling.
- Four operant conditioning corners, each with dual liquid reward, sensors, actors, and a built-in RFID antenna; two motorised doors per corner control drinking-bottle access.
- Validated paradigms: spatial learning (Morris-water-maze comparable), reversal learning, discrimination, fixed-ratio, DRL, active/passive avoidance, working/reference memory, gustatory preference/anhedonia, social hierarchy; spontaneous activity and circadian rhythms 24/7.
- Scale: up to four IntelliCages per computer (64 mice / 32 rats).
- Software modules: Designer, Controller, Analyzer.
- Optional Dark Tunnel Box enrichment shelter; PhenoWorld animal gate for conditional access to external devices.