Name: a conflict model of reward-seeking behavior in male rats
Uploaded: 2019-02-20T15:00:00
Description: Watch this Scientific Journal Video about A Conflict Model of Reward-seeking Behavior in Male Rats at JoVE.com

This paper was supported by CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology (KLMH2016K01) and Evaluation and Intervention Technology Research for Post-traumatic Stress Patients Population (JCYJ20170413170301569)

This study is approved by the International Review Board (IRB) of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and all experiments are conducted in accordance with the National Institutes of Health (U.S.A) Guide for Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (2011).
1. Materials and Setup for the Conflict Model
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	<li>House four rats per cage (50 cm long x 22.5 cm wide x 30 cm high) in colony rooms with controlled temperature (22&#8211;25 &#176;C) and a reversed 12 h/12 h light/dark ...

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The inhibitory control deficits caused by drug abuse18 play a key role in promoting compulsive drug seeking/taking behaviors and relapse19,20. The conflict model presented here provides a new approach to explore the changes in inhibitory control of the individuals exposed to addictive drugs.
There are several critical steps in the protocol. First of all, the subjects (male rats) must acquire sexual experience be...

Drug addiction is a chronic brain disease which is characterized by impulsive and compulsive drug seeking and taking1. These key features of addiction have both been hypothesized to result from the impaired ability of inhibitory control2,3, i.e., failing in inhibiting the immediate pursuit of rewarding stimuli and thus developing maladaptive patterns of behavior4.
The go/no-go task and stop-signal task are the prototypical tasks used to measure the ability of response inhibition2,5. These two experimental paradigms assess one&#39;s ability to suppress actions that are inappropriate, by contrasting infrequent inhibitory responses against an implicit go baseline6,7. The response inhibition displayed in these tasks has been shown to be impaired in cocaine users8,9, opiate addicts10, and nicotine users11. Another two tasks&#8212;reversal learning and multiple choice serial reaction time tasks&#8212;also provide measurements of response inhibition/inhibitory control12,13. However, most of these paradigms performed in rodents not only require long-term training so that subjects can distinguish the response requirements represented by different signals, but also the individual differences in learning speed and learning effects may interfere with the results of subsequent inhibitory test11.
In this paper, we present a novel conflict task which can be used to measure the impairment of inhibitory control after exposure to addictive drugs. In this task, a natural rewarding stimulus (sexual stimulus) that represents a high-value reward14, and the aversive stimuli (pins) that male rats have to conquer, are concurrently presented. The male rats have to climb or jump over the obstacle full of pins to approach and investigate the sexual partner. If the animal persists in its approaching behavior regardless of the aversive stimuli, it is considered as a maladaptive or risky reward-seeking behavior. One of the rationales for establishing this task is that it is conceptually simple and does not place heavy demands on executive processes as other tasks do. Compared to other tasks which measure response inhibition, this conflict task is based on natural behavior, and rats with normal sexual function and sexual experience can be tested directly without a learning process. Another rationale is that a conflict presented in this task between approaching the reward and avoiding the aversive stimuli (or the risk of being pricked) may have a better validity, as it mimics what occurs in addicts who often place themselves in the similar conflict but persistently pursue drug reward regardless of the risk of negative consequences in real life15.
Therefore, application of this conflict model is a quick and sensitive way to discover the deficit in inhibitory control after exposure to addictive drugs, or other factors that may influence ability of inhibitory control, such as stress. It also provides a novel behavioral strategy for investigation of neural mechanisms underlying deficits in inhibitory control. Furthermore, alternative modifications can be added onto this task. For example, altering the cost/benefit ratio by replacing the sexual stimulus with the social stimulus can reveal more behavioral significances.

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a conflict model of reward-seeking behavior in male rats

The present protocol describes a novel conflict task as a model of inhibitory control in rats. In this model, a natural rewarding stimulus (sexual stimulus) that represents a high-value reward, and the aversive stimuli (pins), are concurrently presented. The male rats have to climb or jump over the obstacle full of pins to approach and investigate the sexual partner. If the animal persists in their approaching behavior regardless of the aversive stimuli, it is considered as a maladaptive or risky reward-seeking behavior. The conflict task permits the evaluation of deficit in inhibitory control resulting from exposure to abused drug, such as morphine, or a stressful event. 
The main advantage of this model is that it provides a simple and quick way to discover the deficit in inhibitory control after exposure to opiate drugs or other stressful events. In addition to opiates, this behavioral model would also be useful for quickly discovering the inhibitory control deficits induced by other addictive drugs. However, the limitation is that the male rats' performance may be subject to exercising effects with repeated testing under this conflict task. In the future, one can hope that the individuals with the compulsive phenotype of reward-seeking behavior after exposure to opiates will be identified based on modifying this conflict model.

To explore whether this conflict model can reveal maladaptive/risky reward-seeking behavior induced by opiates, the reward-seeking behaviors displayed by the saline- and morphine-pretreated groups were compared by t-tests after short-term (Wd7) and long-term (Wd17) withdrawal from morphine respectively (Figure 2). The results show that on both day 7 and day 17 of withdrawal, the morphine-pretreated rats showed significantly more approaching behaviors than the...

Watch this Scientific Journal Video about A Conflict Model of Reward-seeking Behavior in Male Rats at JoVE.com

A Conflict Model of Reward-seeking Behavior in Male Rats

This conflict model is used to measure the impairment of inhibitory control after exposure to addictive drugs, or other factors that may influence inhibitory control. A sexual stimulus and an aversive obstacle are concurrently presented, thus male rats have to conquer the obstacle to approach the sexual reward.

The present protocol describes a novel conflict task as a model of inhibitory control in rats. In this model, a natural rewarding stimulus (sexual ...

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This protocol describes the modified hole board (mHB), which combines features from a traditional hole board and open field and is designed to measure ...

Acquisition of a High-precision Skilled Forelimb Reaching Task in Rats

Movements are the main measurable output of central nervous system function. Developing behavioral paradigms that allow detailed analysis of motor ...

The Rodent Psychomotor Vigilance Test (rPVT): A Method for Assessing Neurobehavioral Performance in Rats and Mice

The Rodent Psychomotor Vigilance Test rPVT: A Method for Assessing Neurobehavioral Performance in Rats and Mice

The human Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT) is a widely used procedure for measuring changes in fatigue and sustained attention. The present article ...

Detecting Behavioral Deficits in Rats After Traumatic Brain Injury

With the increasing incidence of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in both civilian and military populations, TBI is now considered a chronic disease; however, ...

A New Method for Inducing a Depression-Like Behavior in Rats

Contagious depression is a phenomenon that is yet to be fully recognized and this stems from insufficient material on the subject. At the moment, there is ...

A Conditioned Place Preference Protocol for Measuring Incubation of Craving in Rats

A major cause of repeated relapses is a craving for the drug. Drug craving increases progressively during the abstinence period, a phenomenon termed ...