Physiology & behavior
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Physiology & behavior · Jun 2009
Behavioral effects of ventilated micro-environment housing in three inbred mouse strains.
Animal facilities aim to combine animal welfare with cost-efficiency and limited care staff requirements, and individually ventilated cage (IVC) systems were developed towards these goals. While IVC have great sanitary advantages both for the animals but also for the care staff, these systems involve potentially deleterious features such as high levels of air renewal, noise, and subtle vibrations of the racks because of the air filtering system used, but also reduce the frequency of stressful cage changes. It is unknown in how far these conditions may influence the animals' behavior. ⋯ Results demonstrate robust effects of IVC in multiple behavioral tests with the direction of the effect strongly dependent on strain and sex. These data should serve to alert researchers that a switch to IVC housing during the course of an experiment has the potential to bias results in a serious manner. In addition, behavioral baseline data will have to be re-established once the switch has been completed.
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Physiology & behavior · Jun 2009
Consummatory successive negative and anticipatory contrast effects in inbred Roman rats.
Three experiments were designed to study the performance of female inbred Roman High-(RHA-I) and Low-(RLA-I) Avoidance rats in a consummatory task in which successive negative (cSNC) and anticipatory contrast (cANC) effects were induced by changing the concentration of the sucrose solution used as reward. Both RHA-I and RLA-I rats showed a significant suppression of drinking (cSNC) when they were exposed to 32% sucrose in preshift phase and 4% in postshift phase, in comparison to RHA-I and RLA-I control groups always exposed to 4% sucrose (Experiment 1). ⋯ Finally, no consumption differences were observed between RHA-I and RLA-I rats exposed to brief daily access to 4% sucrose followed by access to 22% sucrose (cANC, Experiment 3). These results suggest that differences between the Roman rat strains in consummatory contrast paradigms can only be observed when the sucrose solution manipulation implies an incentive loss-attenuated emotional situation, but not when it occurs in an anticipatory manner.