Establishment of a rodent cooperation assay as a model of social cognition

Abstract

Impaired cooperative skills form a characteristic symptom in autism, which lacks adequate treatment. The objective of this study was to establish a rat cooperation assay which fits the feasibility and capacity requirements of drug development.Long-Evans and Lister Hooded rats were trained in pairs to simultaneously perform nose-pokes (within 1 s) for reward in a Skinner box equipped with two nose-poke modules. Conditioning took place first with naive-naive pairs, then with naive-experienced and finally with experienced-experienced pairs, when the task was familiar for both rats. In a control experiment, experienced Lister-hooded pairs were tested under the learnt schedule but without the possibility to communicate with each other.Rats were able to learn the task in 8-15 sessions. Experienced-experienced Long-Evans pairs completed the training significantly faster than the other pairs Analysis of the nose-poke latency data, sample video-recordings and the significantly decreased performance of rats in the control experiment suggested that the animals solved the task via real cooperation.The newly developed rat cooperation model is quick and has sufficiently high throughput, therefore it may be used in the drug development of putative social cognitive enhancer compounds.