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Full-Text Articles in Medicine and Health Sciences
Rats’ Novel Object Interaction As A Measure Of Environmental Familiarity, Jamie L. Wilkinson, Laura Herrman, Matthew I. Palmatier, Rick A. Bevins
Rats’ Novel Object Interaction As A Measure Of Environmental Familiarity, Jamie L. Wilkinson, Laura Herrman, Matthew I. Palmatier, Rick A. Bevins
Rick A. Bevins
Environmental familiarization is a learning phenomenon embedded within most tasks used to study learning and motivation. Given its prevalence there is surprisingly little systematic behavioral research on factors affecting familiarization. The six experiments reported in the present report used rats’ tendency to interact more with a novel object in a familiar than in a novel environment as a measure of environmental familiarization. We found that 3 min of exposure to the environment was sufficient to increase object interaction above unfamiliar controls even when testing occurred up to 48 h after initial exposure to the environment; 1 or 1.5 min of …
Novelty Reward As A Measure Of Anhedonia, Rick A. Bevins, Joyce Besheer
Novelty Reward As A Measure Of Anhedonia, Rick A. Bevins, Joyce Besheer
Rick A. Bevins
A decrease in sensitivity to pleasurable stimuli, anhedonia, is a major symptom of depression in humans. Several animal models have been developed to simulate this symptom (e.g. drug withdrawal, learned helplessness) using reward-sensitive procedures such as intracranial self-stimulation and progressive ratio responding as a measure of reward function. Recently, we introduced the use of another procedure, novel-object place conditioning in rats, to measure reward function in an associative learning situation. Withdrawal from chronic nicotine blocked a place preference conditioned by access to novel objects. This blockade was not due to impairment of object interaction, general activity, novelty detection, environmental familiarization, …