Exploratory Activity of Rats in Three Different Environments

Genaro, Gelson; Schmidek, Werner Robert

doi:10.1046/j.1439-0310.2000.00605.x

Cited by 36 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Traveling close to the walls of the cage or open field has been a prominent feature of the behavior of laboratory rats [27], as it is in wild rats, which tend to stay in contact with vertical objects or the periphery of open space [1]. Indeed, when tested in an open field with or without access to shelter, rats remained over 90% of the time along the perimeter, suggesting that the walls confer anxiety-relieving body contact [16]. In the same vein, the present study with voles revealed that with increase in arena size, voles traveled increasingly more along the perimeter and, whether locomoting or not, remained most of the time close to the walls.…”

Section: Spatial Distributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this test an animal (usually a rodent) is introduced into a plain and illuminated arena [16] and observed for periods ranging from acute exposure of a few minutes [7] to repeated exposures of several hours [30]. Open-field behavior in rodents, mainly laboratory rats and mice, is commonly regarded as a fundamental index of their general behavior.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The open-field test has been criticized, arguing that it evaluates emotional reaction more than exploratory motivation, thus contributing to the fallacy of taking general motor patterns as the sole expression of any specific motivation [22]. The controversy has extended to the structure of the apparatus itself, which was described as "a poor and explicitly aversive environment with excess light and open spaces that does not elicit exploratory motivation" [16]. However, when the open-field test was not extrapolated to the study of drive or motivation, but rather to the spatio-temporal structure of locomotor behavior, it offered a valuable and reliable test of * Tel.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Open-field behavior withstands drastic changes in arena size

Eilam

2003

Behavioural Brain Research

130

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Individual voles were tested on successive days under increasing, decreasing, or randomly changing arena size. Locomotor behavior was adjusted to arena size by (i) preserving the same level of activity, (ii) taking longer but less frequent trips in smaller arenas in contrast to taking more frequent yet shorter trips in the larger arenas, and (iii) moving in the entire space available for exploration in the smaller arenas in contrast to remaining along the walls of the open field in the larger arenas. The effect of testing order was minimal, probably being related to increased novelty under increasing arena size, as opposed to habituation under decreasing arena size, when parts of the same area were re-explored. These behavioral changes averaged up to a two-fold difference compared with the larger six-fold change in the perimeter and 44-fold change in the area of the open field. The modest change in open-field behavior indicates that it has a solid spatio-temporal structure that withstands extensive environmental changes. This behavioral stability and consistency further validates studies of pharmacological, neurological, and genetic preparations that use behavior in a small open field as representation of the general pattern of behavior.

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Section: Spatial Distributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Open-field behavior withstands drastic changes in arena size

Eilam

2003

Behavioural Brain Research

130

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“…placed within an open-field [27,55,84], and foraging behavior depends mostly on safety needs rather than food availability. In presence of a threat animals show preference for a refuge [3,19,37,45,69,75].…”

Section: D 21mentioning

confidence: 99%

Slope climbing challenges, fear of heights, anxiety and time of the day

Ennaceur

Hussain

Abuhamdah

et al. 2017

Behavioural Brain Research

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Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Summary: When exposed to an unfamiliar open space, animals experience fear and attempt to find an escape route. Anxiety emerges when animals are confronted with a challenging obstacle to this fear motivated escape. High anxiety animals do not take risks; they avoid the challenge. The present experiments investigated this risk avoidant behavior in mice. In experiment 1, BALB/c, C57BL/6J and CD-1 mice were exposed to a large platform with downward inclined steep slopes attached on two opposite sides. The platform was elevated 75 and 100 cm from the ground, in a standard (SPDS) and in a raised (RPDS) configuration, respectively. In experiment 2, the platform was elevated 75 cm from the ground. Mice had to climb onto a stand at the top of upward inclined slopes (SPUS). In experiment 3, BALB/c mice were exposed to SPDS with steep or shallow slopes either in early morning or in late afternoon. In all 3 test configurations, mice spent more time in the areas adjacent to the slopes than in the areas adjacent to void, however only C57BL/6J and CD-1 crossed onto the slopes in SPDS, and crossed onto the stands in SPUS whereas BALB/c remained on the platform in SPDS and explored the slopes in SPUS. Elevation of the platform from the ground reduced the crossings onto the slopes in C57BL/6J and CD-1, and no differences were observed between BALB/c and C57BL/6J. BALB/c mice demonstrated no difference in anxiety when tested early morning or late afternoon; they crossed onto shallow slopes and avoided the steep one.

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“…Prior work (Eilam and Golani 1989) demonstrated that rats in open fields spontaneously choose a "home base" location from which they make exploratory forays and to which they tend to return at a higher rate of speed; based on this and to ameliorate the aversive component of open-field testing (Archer 1973;Stanford 2007) we provided a small, dark, enclosed "refuge" to serve as an ethologically relevant home base candidate attached to the complex environment. Exploration in the complex arena was thus voluntary (Genaro and Schmidek 2000;Whishaw et al 2006). Three groups of rats were used to test if past experience with complexity improves learning and transfers search strategies.…”

Section: [Supplemental Materials Is Available For This Article]mentioning

confidence: 99%

Experiential learning in rodents: past experience enables rapid learning and localized encoding in hippocampus

et al. 2017

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Humans routinely use past experience with complexity to deal with novel, challenging circumstances. This fundamental aspect of real-world behavior has received surprisingly little attention in animal studies, and the underlying brain mechanisms are unknown. The present experiments tested for transfer from past experience in rats and then used quantitative imaging to localize synaptic modifications in hippocampus. Six daily exposures to an enriched environment (EE) caused a marked enhancement of short-and long-term memory encoded during a 30-min session in a different and complex environment relative to rats given extensive handling or access to running wheels. Relatedly, the EE animals investigated the novel environment in a different manner than the other groups, suggesting transfer of exploration strategies acquired in earlier interactions with complexity. This effect was not associated with changes in the number or size of excitatory synapses in hippocampus. Maps of synapses expressing a marker for long-term potentiation indicated that encoding in the EE group, relative to control animals, was concentrated in hippocampal field CA1. Importantly, <1% of the total population of synapses was involved in production of the regional map. These results constitute the first evidence that the transfer of experience profoundly affects the manner in which hippocampus encodes complex information. [Supplemental material is available for this article.]Transfer of learning is the capacity to effectively use abilities or information acquired in previous contexts in a new situation (Baldwin and Ford 1988;Perkins and Salomon 1992;Pan and Yang 2010). Importantly, learning and behavior in both the original and the new context may be self-directed, or may involve external guidance to varying degrees. Learning of the former typewithout external instruction, supervision, or reinforcement-is of particular interest and has been investigated in cognitive psychology (Fisher et al. 1991), education (Kolb 2015, perception and inference (Barlow 1989(Barlow , 1990, and machine learning (Hastie et al. 2009). It is widely recognized that the transfer of knowledge or strategies gained during learning to new situations is essential for the efficacy and flexibility of human behavior, particularly in unsupervised contexts. Despite this, there has been little work on whether and to what degree the effect occurs in laboratory animals. The present work used a combination of unsupervised experience with a complex environment followed by exposure to novel conditions to address this question. The results enabled a first investigation into how transfer affects the manner in which the hippocampus, a structure critical to unsupervised learning, encodes new information.We began with a straightforward extension of a well-known phenomenon: the reduction of spontaneous locomotor activity over time by rats in a novel open field. While open-field testing was originally introduced (Hall and Ballachey 1932) to measure emotionality, it became widely used as a simp...

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Exploratory Activity of Rats in Three Different Environments

Cited by 36 publications

References 15 publications

Open-field behavior withstands drastic changes in arena size

Open-field behavior withstands drastic changes in arena size

Slope climbing challenges, fear of heights, anxiety and time of the day

Experiential learning in rodents: past experience enables rapid learning and localized encoding in hippocampus

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