TongueTwister: an integrated program for analyzing lickometer data.

The analysis of lickometer data is often rendered prohibitively tedious by the large volume of data generated by the typical experiment. TongueTwister is an integrated program for the rapid and automatic analysis, presentation, and summary of long- and medium-access data collected by lickometers or of brief-access data collected by multi-bottle lickometers such as the DiLog Instruments MS80. The program was written in C+2 for Macintosh computers, and analyzes data collected by MS-DOS PCs. It takes advantage of the Macintosh user interface to provide quick and convenient output from all the files of a single experimental session, and to export the data to third-party statistical software or other documents. It can batch-process data files by automatically opening and analyzing all the files in a directory; thus, the user can employ directories as a simple database for organizing experimental groups. When a lickometer data file is opened, a textual summary, a raster plot of the lick pattern, the cumulative licks, the lick rate, a histogram of inter-lick intervals, and a breakdown of the session by fractions are automatically calculated and displayed. When an MS80 brief-access file is opened, the lick pattern for each tube presentation and a textual summary of the mean values derived for each tube are automatically displayed. If a directory of files is opened, the mean values derived across all the individual files are calculated and graphed. Analysis parameters can be tailored to the investigator's liking. Tables or graphs can be saved to disk, or copied and pasted into other Macintosh programs for additional analysis. The program may also be used for general-purpose analysis of periodic event records.