Social vs. Nonsocial Housing Differentially Affects Perseverative Behavior in Rats (Ratus norvegicus)

Abstract

Perseverance, also commonly referred to as grit or industriousness, is the continued effort exerted to complete goal-directed tasks. Many factors, such as stress, can contribute to perseverative behavior, but the role of sociality on perseverance in animal models has not been studied. In this experiment, perseverance was measured in Long-Evans rats; half of which were socially housed (SH) and the other half were nonsocially housed (NSH). Rats were placed in a continuous T-maze; one arm of the maze contained an unobstructed low value reward and the other arm contained a high value reward blocked by a barrier that progressively increased in height across testing sessions. We will hereon refer to the low value reward and high value reward as the low reward and the high reward, respectively. Perseverative behavior was assessed by time spent interacting with the barrier and trials were characterized as either adaptive perseverative trials (high reward obtainment) and maladaptive perseverative trials (low reward obtainment after abandoning attempts to overcome the high reward barrier). SH and NSH rats were equally proficient at overcoming a physical barrier to obtain a higher-valued reward, but the NSH rats spent more time interacting with the barriers during maladaptive perseverative trials than SH rats. NSH rats thus exhibited prolonged efforts to overcome the barrier only to ultimately travel to the low reward option. In contrast, SH rats selected the low reward option earlier in the trial and did not maladaptively perseverate without obtaining the high reward. Putative evidence for increased perseverance in NSH rats is explained in the context of maladaptive perseverative behavior rather than perseverance per se. Increased adaptability and acquisition of task-set in SH rats suggests a role of social housing in advantageous decision making.

Social housing enhances acquisition of task set independently of environmental enrichment: A longitudinal study in the Barnes maze

“…Considering these results, the most parsimonious explanation is that social housing enhanced overall cognitive flexibility and acquisition of task set, rather than spatial learning itself. These results are consistent with our previous findings that SH rats display more efficient task set acquisition when assessed for grit/industriousness ( Hemmer et al, 2019 ). This is in line with research showing that play-fighting with peers enhances task switching and overall cognitive flexibility ( Pellis, Pellis, & Himmler, 2014 ).…”

“…Rats were 5, 14, and 22 months old (PND 143, 428, and 672 respectively) at the start of each behavioral battery. Aside from the tasks described in this paper, these rats were subjected to the radial arm maze, open field observations, ( Templer, Wise, & Heimer-McGinn, 2018 ), the social interaction paradigm ( Templer, Wise, Dayaw, & Dayaw, 2018a ) and a continuous T-maze task with a differential reward ( Hemmer et al, 2019 ). The results of this overall longitudinal study were published in separate reports to allow us to delve deeper into each task.…”

Replications, Comparisons, Sampling and the Problem of Representativeness in Animal Cognition Research

“…This is an unavoidable consequence of working with difficult to reach populations ( Lange, 2019 ), but it should be accounted for when building theories. This is important as many aspects of animal behavior vary across samples; for example, due to experimenter effects ( Beran, 2012 ; Bohlen et al, 2014 ; Cibulski et al, 2014 ; Pfungst, 2018 ; Sorge et al, 2014 ), genetic variation ( Fawcett et al, 2014 ; Johnson et al, 2015 ; MacLean et al, 2019 ), housing conditions ( Farmer et al, 2019 ; Hemmer et al, 2019 ; Würbel, 2001 ), diets ( Davidson et al, 2018 ; Höttges et al, 2019 ), and learning/developmental histories ( Skinner, 1976 ).…”

Replications, Comparisons, Sampling and the Problem of Representativeness in Animal Cognition Research

“…This may be an unavoidable consequence of working with difficult to reach populations (Lange, 2019), but it should be accounted for when building theories. This is important as many aspects of animal behavior may be variable across samples, for example due to experimenter effects (Beran, 2012;Bohlen et al, 2014;Cibulski et al, 2014;Pfungst, 1911;Sorge et al, 2014), genetic variation (Fawcett et al, 2014;Johnson et al, 2015;MacLean et al, 2019), housing conditions (Farmer et al, 2019;Hemmer et al, 2019;Würbel, 2001), diets (Davidson et al, 2018;Höttges et al, 2019), and learning/developmental histories (Skinner, 1976).…”