Control center for the body and carrier of personality: The brain is our most fascinating organ. Neuroscience aims to understand the complex interactions of different brain regions and their effects on behavior, emotions and cognitive functions. This knowledge is necessary to better understand neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or schizophrenia and to develop treatment options. The brain is also responsible for planning and controlling movement. Understanding this enables the development of neuroprostheses that help patients to regain some of the bodily functions they have lost. 

In conventional neuroscientific experiments, rhesus monkeys are trained to sit in a chair and interact with the environment using their arms, for example by operating a touchscreen. This method allows precisely controlled experiments to measure and analyze the neural activity underlying decision-making or goal-directed arm movements.

However, humans and other primates not only interact with their environment by sitting and pointing, but also by moving their whole body. For example, we make lightning-fast decisions about which side we want to avoid an oncoming person on our way through the city while we keep moving. How perception, decision-making and movement control are interlinked and how distributed brain regions generate these functions is a central question in brain research. 

To get closer to an answer to these questions, we have developed the versatile, configurable Exploration Room. This enables us to measure the neuronal activity of animals as they move freely through the room. Their body movements are precisely recorded with the help of artificial intelligence. This allows us to study brain processes that we have not been able to investigate in conventional experiments so far; processes that determine whether the animal wants to go to the right or left food source, for example, how it directs its movements towards a goal and adopts a wide variety of body postures in order to obtain the rewards offered in different ways. The room offers space for more than one animal and also allows questions to be addressed about how social animals make their decisions together or in competition with conspecifics.