Abstract
Social cooperation is defined as a joint action for mutual benefit that depends on the individual and the counterparts’ behaviors. To gain valid evidence for social cooperation behavior we conducted a series of experiments in our suggested fully automated non-conditioned maze and depicted three major findings: (i) During 18 days of training the rats showed a progressive social learning curve as well as latent social learning; (ii) Examining the perceptual communication between the cooperating partners, we found a correlation between the available perceptual modalities and the social cooperation performance; and (iii) Investigating contextual learning as a competing process to the social cooperation, we found that additional contextual cues impaired the social cooperation performance. In conclusion, our suggested automated cooperation maze is designed to further our understanding of social cooperation under normal conditions, such as decision-making, and to examine the neural basis of social cooperation. A variety of neuropsychiatric disorders are characterized by disruptions in social behavior and social cognition, including depression, autism spectrum disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia. Thus, on the pathological end, our maze for social cooperation evaluation can contribute significantly to the investigation of a wide range of social cooperation impairments in a rodent model.
Highlights
Social cooperation is defined as a joint action for mutual benefit that depends on the individual and the counterparts’ behaviors
Social cooperation is defined as a joint action for mutual benefit[1] that depends on the individual behavior and on the behaviors of others[2]
Social cooperation in humans is evident in daily interactions, decision making, and cooperation toward mutual goals, that is modulated by positive[3] or negative rewards[4]
Summary
Social cooperation is defined as a joint action for mutual benefit that depends on the individual and the counterparts’ behaviors. Further attempt to investigate cooperation in rats was carried out using operant chambers[19] In this task, rats were individually trained for 4 weeks in a fixed ratio schedule of reinforcement for nose poke conditioning (light as the conditioned stimulus) that was rewarded if the nose poke was performed within 2 seconds. Rats were individually trained for 4 weeks in a fixed ratio schedule of reinforcement for nose poke conditioning (light as the conditioned stimulus) that was rewarded if the nose poke was performed within 2 seconds Thereafter, they were tested in pairs for mutual performance. Schuster and Berger[20–22] introduced rats to a shuttle box, in which www.nature.com/scientificreports/
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