Dataset Information

Complex Housing, but Not Maternal Deprivation Affects Motivation to Liberate a Trapped Cage-Mate in an Operant Rat Task.

ABSTRACT: Early life environment influences the development of various aspects of social behavior, particularly during sensitive developmental periods. We studied how challenges in the early postnatal period or (early) adolescence affect pro-social behavior. To this end, we designed a lever-operated liberation task, to be able to measure motivation to liberate a trapped conspecific (by progressively increasing required lever pressing for door-opening). Liberation of the trapped rat resulted either in social contact or in liberation into a separate compartment. Additionally, a condition was tested in which both rats could freely move in two separate compartments and lever pressing resulted in social contact. When partners were not trapped, rats were more motivated to press the lever for opening the door than in either of the trapped configurations. Contrary to our expectations, the trapped configuration resulted in a reduced motivation to act. Early postnatal stress (24 h maternal deprivation on postnatal day 3) did not affect behavior in the liberation task. However, rearing rats from early adolescence onwards in complex housing conditions (Marlau cages) reduced the motivation to door opening, both in the trapped and freely moving conditions, while the motivation for a sucrose reward was not affected.

SUBMITTER: Kalamari A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8427758 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Complex Housing, but Not Maternal Deprivation Affects Motivation to Liberate a Trapped Cage-Mate in an Operant Rat Task.

Kalamari Aikaterini A Kentrop Jiska J Hinna Danesi Chiara C Graat Evelien A M EAM van IJzendoorn Marinus H MH Bakermans-Kranenburg Marian J MJ Joëls Marian M van der Veen Rixt R

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience 20210826

Early life environment influences the development of various aspects of social behavior, particularly during sensitive developmental periods. We studied how challenges in the early postnatal period or (early) adolescence affect pro-social behavior. To this end, we designed a lever-operated liberation task, to be able to measure motivation to liberate a trapped conspecific (by progressively increasing required lever pressing for door-opening). Liberation of the trapped rat resulted either in soci ...[more]

PMID: 34512284

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Project description:Loss of motivation and learning impairments are commonly accepted core symptoms of psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. Reward-motivated learning is dependent on the hippocampal formation but the molecular mechanisms that lead to functional incentive motivation in this brain region are still largely unknown. Recent evidence implicates neurotransmission via metabotropic glutamate receptors and Homer1, their interaction partner in the postsynaptic density, in drug addiction and motivational learning. As previous reports mainly focused on the prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens, we now investigated the role of hippocampal Homer1 in operant reward learning in the present study. We therefore tested either Homer1 knockout mice or mice that overexpress Homer1 in the hippocampus in an operant conditioning paradigm. Our results show that deletion of Homer1 leads to a diverging phenotype that either displays an inability to perform the task or outstanding hyperactivity in both learning and motivational sessions. Due to the apparent bimodal distribution of this phenotype, the overall effect of Homer1 deletion in this paradigm is not significantly altered. Overexpression of hippocampal Homer1 did not lead to a significantly altered learning performance in any stage of the testing paradigm, yet may subtly contribute to emerging motivational deficits. Our results indicate an involvement of Homer1-mediated signaling in the hippocampus in motivation-based learning tasks and encourage further investigations regarding the specific molecular underpinnings of the phenotypes observed in this study. We also suggest to cautiously interpret the results of this and other studies regarding the phenotype following Homer1 manipulations in animals, since their behavioral phenotype appears to be highly diverse. Future studies would benefit from larger group sizes that would allow splitting the experimental groups in responders and non-responders.

Dataset Information

Complex Housing, but Not Maternal Deprivation Affects Motivation to Liberate a Trapped Cage-Mate in an Operant Rat Task.

Publications

Complex Housing, but Not Maternal Deprivation Affects Motivation to Liberate a Trapped Cage-Mate in an Operant Rat Task.

Similar Datasets

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