Social order: Using the sequential structure of social interaction to discriminate abnormal social behavior in the rat

Abstract

Social interactions form the basis of a broad range of functions related to survival and mating. The complexity of social behaviors and the flexibility required for normal social interactions make social behavior particularly susceptible to disruption. The consequences of developmental insults in the social domain and the associated neurobiological factors are commonly studied in rodents. Though methods for investigating social interactions in the laboratory are diverse, animals are typically placed together in an apparatus for a brief period (under 30 min) and allowed to interact freely while behavior is recorded for subsequent analysis. A standard approach to the analysis of social behavior involves quantification of the frequency and duration of individual social behaviors. This approach provides information about the allocation of time to particular behaviors within a session, which is typically sufficient for detection of robust alterations in behavior. Virtually all social species, however, display complex sequences of social behavior that are not captured in the quantification of individual behaviors. Sequences of behavior may provide more sensitive indicators of disruptions in social behavior. Sophisticated analysis systems for quantification of behavior sequences have been available for many years; however, the required training and time to complete these analyses represent significant barriers to high-throughput assessments. We present a simple approach to the quantification of behavioral sequences that requires minimal additional analytical steps after individual behaviors are coded. We implement this approach to identify altered social behavior in rats exposed to alcohol during prenatal development, and show that the frequency of several pairwise sequences of behavior discriminate controls from ethanol-exposed rats when the frequency of individual behaviors involved in those sequences does not. Thus, the approach described here may be useful in detecting subtle deficits in the social domain and identifying neural circuits involved in the organization of social behavior.

Paranoia as a deficit in non-social belief updating

“…But they are not completely asocial. In our experiment they were housed in pairs, and, more broadly, they evince social affiliative interactions with other rats ( Donaldson et al, 2018 ; Kondrakiewicz et al, 2019 ; Urbach et al, 2010 ). A further limitation centers on the comparability of our experimental designs.…”

Effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on social competence: Asymmetry in play partner preference among heterogeneous triads of male and female rats

“…Methods utilizing dyadic play protocols in PAE rodent models have demonstrated that PAE may reverse the sex‐typical expression of play behavior (Meyer & Riley, ), lead to overall increases in play behavior relative to control animals (Royalty, ), and disrupt processing of social cues important for play behavior (Charles Lawrence et al, ). Importantly, these PAE‐related play behavior alterations may be the root of many of the long‐lasting social behavior deficits observed in PAE animals, including altered patterns of social behavior (Donaldson et al, ), impaired social recognition memory (Holman, Ellis, Morgan, & Weinberg, ; Kelly, Leggett, & Cronise, ), and reduced social interaction (Hellemans, Sliwowska, Verma, & Weinberg, ).…”

Recurrence quantification analysis in the study of online coordination in Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus).

“…Rats are social animals with a very complex social structure (Blanchard et al, 1988; Calhoun, 2016). Studying their interactions allows us to observe, for instance, the shaping of the social hierarchy, which involves expressing a wide range of agonistic behaviors (Miczek & de Boer, 2009; Donaldson et al, 2018).…”

“…Additionally, detecting very subtle changes, disruptions, and abnormalities in social behavior and its timing and sequence is of significant importance i.a. a description of the demands made upon the central nervous system (Golani, 1976), in the case of which manual scoring based on traditional approach (i.e., quantification of frequency and duration of behavioral bouts) is insufficient (Donaldson et al, 2018). Finally, manual scoring usually requires time-consuming pretraining, coding the same videos by several coders, and interrater reliability, which is considered satisfactory if it reaches as low as 80% agreement between the coders (Haidet, Tate, Divirgilio-Thomas, Kolanowski, & Happ, 2009).…”

“…Although TPA is even able to find coupled behaviors among time series and the average time of these sequences of behaviors (Casarrubea et al, 2017), it is not able to provide a precise account of the temporal dynamics (e.g., lags or subtle changes from synchronous movements) of coupled behaviors. Recently, Donaldson et al (2018) presented a method, where all possible sequences of behaviors were coded in a series of strings which were then searched for all possible paired sequences. This tool proved useful to detect subtle behavioral alterations in the social domain, but it lacked precise timing among behaviors, was limited to a small number of behaviors, and could suffer from the subjectivity of the coding and choosing behaviors.…”