Dataset Information

Housing conditions and stimulus females: a robust social discrimination task for studying male rodent social recognition.

ABSTRACT: Social recognition (SR) enables rodents to distinguish between familiar and novel conspecifics, largely through individual odor cues. SR tasks utilize the tendency for a male to sniff and interact with a novel individual more than a familiar individual. Many paradigms have been used to study the roles of the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin in SR. However, inconsistencies in results have arisen within similar mouse strains, and across different paradigms and laboratories, making reliable testing of SR difficult. The current protocol details a novel approach that is replicable across investigators and in different strains of mice. We created a protocol that uses gonadally intact, singly housed females presented within corrals to group-housed males. Housing females singly before testing is particularly important for reliable discrimination. This methodology will be useful for studying short-term social memory in rodents, and may also be applicable for longer term studies.

SUBMITTER: Macbeth AH

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3018731 | biostudies-literature | 2009

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Housing conditions and stimulus females: a robust social discrimination task for studying male rodent social recognition.

Macbeth Abbe H AH Edds Jennifer Stepp JS Young W Scott WS

Nature protocols 20091008 11

Social recognition (SR) enables rodents to distinguish between familiar and novel conspecifics, largely through individual odor cues. SR tasks utilize the tendency for a male to sniff and interact with a novel individual more than a familiar individual. Many paradigms have been used to study the roles of the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin in SR. However, inconsistencies in results have arisen within similar mouse strains, and across different paradigms and laboratories, making reliable t ...[more]

PMID: 19816420

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Project description:This article presents the NeoHelp visual stimulus set created to facilitate investigation of need-of-help recognition with clinical and normative populations of different ages, including children. Need-of-help recognition is one aspect of socioemotional development and a necessary precondition for active helping. The NeoHelp consists of picture pairs showing everyday situations: The first item in a pair depicts a child needing help to achieve a goal; the second one shows the child achieving the goal. Pictures of birds in analogue situations are also included. These control stimuli enable implementation of a human-animal categorization task which serves to separate behavioral correlates specific to need-of-help recognition from general differentiation processes. It is a concern in experimental research to ensure that results do not relate to systematic perceptual differences when comparing responses to categories of different content. Therefore, we not only derived the NeoHelp-pictures within a pair from one another by altering as little as possible, but also assessed their perceptual similarity empirically. We show that NeoHelp-picture pairs are very similar regarding low-level perceptual properties across content categories. We obtained data from 60 children in a broad age range (4 to 13 years) for three different paradigms, in order to assess whether the intended categorization and differentiation could be observed reliably in a normative population. Our results demonstrate that children can differentiate the pictures' content regarding both need-of-help category as well as species as intended in spite of the high perceptual similarities. We provide standard response characteristics (hit rates and response times) that are useful for future selection of stimuli and comparison of results across studies. We show that task requirements coherently determine which aspects of the pictures influence response characteristics. Thus, we present NeoHelp, the first open-access standardized visual stimuli set for investigation of need-of-help recognition and invite researchers to use and extend it.

Dataset Information

Housing conditions and stimulus females: a robust social discrimination task for studying male rodent social recognition.

Publications

Housing conditions and stimulus females: a robust social discrimination task for studying male rodent social recognition.

Similar Datasets

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