rats - setting up the attentional set shifting task - Basic info, tips
Dear Maria,
Attentional Set Shifting was tested in this paper: Rats were trained to dig in bowls for a food reward. The bowls were presented in pairs, only one of which was baited. The rat had to select the bowl in which to dig by its odor, the medium that filled the bowl, or the texture that covered its surface. In a single session, rats performed a series of discriminations, including reversals, an intradimensional shift, and an extradimensional shift. "
Based on Norman L. Munn's 1950 handbook on psychological research in the rat you can change the suface on the bowls e.g. black-white stripes or black dots on white. The rat learn to discriminate between odors and patterns at the same time. Pup odors are strong stimuli as well as open field floors and walls in my research on mice. You can also take the odors of familiar bedding from the cage and test it against unused bedding or unfamiliar used beddings and so on in an open field with black versus white floors or walls.
The quote was from the abstract in the paper:
Medial Frontal Cortex Mediates Perceptual Attentional Set Shifting in the Rat
Jennifer M. Birrell and Verity J. Brown
The Journal of Neuroscience, 1 June 2000, 20(11): 4320-4324;
Only your imagination puts a limit to what you can do in this case:)
If you want to adapt the commonly-used rodent set-shifting task (i.e., that developed by Verity Brown) to have a spatial discrimination component, then you would have to train animals to locate the food reinforcer along the spatial dimension, that is, left and right. Odor cues can be used just as they are in the dozens of publications that use this task.
The first of these papers is, more or less, the first account of set-shifting with odor in rodents and the other two are variations based off of the first paper.
Hope this helps.
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