There's some neat software now (not sure if it was around when you were in college) to translate video into reliable data about the movement of animals. I've used it for fish, but the same software can be used to track people around a room or to track mice in a cage. I think that might be much more useful than, say, how many backflips a mouse does in their cage.
This was about 9 years ago, so it probably existed in a certain sense, but our lab computers were still apple II's because that was what the software for the VO2 sensors was written for. The lab group doing the caffeine experiment was trying to measure whether the resting VO2 went up when dosed with caffeine, so the fact that the rats were moving at all was the primary problem.
We tried using a machine vision program written by a grad student at another college to count trees from old survey photos at one point, and it did not work well at all in anything with more trees than a park-like setting. We ended up just having a human circle all the trees they saw and I wrote a program to detect the circles. It worked much better. The program I created was based on something similar used to count bacteria colonies on petri dishes.
