Hey all,
In a lab I am working in, I designed a behavioral experiment protocol that involves mice being able to freeze in the presence of a specific static visual pattern. I also need them to distinguish that from a different static visual pattern.
The design would utilize fear conditioning inside of a square operant box. My main concern is that during training the mice might not pay attention to a small monitor inside of the operant box that will be displaying the visual pattern thus during training we could end up shocking (2 seconds, .7mA) inattentive mice and make them afraid of the box instead of the visual pattern.
Will mice look at the visual due to their nature or will I need to implement a pre-training step. Any research papers detailing their pre-training techniques will help as well, I've looked on google scholar but only come across papers that mention pre-training with little to no detail on their procedure.
also I don't think positive reinforcement training is available to me. I think I have to do this through shock based training.
Hi bud,
This seems incredibly relevent to your paper Article Light and the laboratory mouse
I'dd start by giving that a look. One of the main things I noticed was that many laboritory mice seem to suffer from visual degradation, therefore, you might want to consider using a sound or possibly specific sound pattern to illustrate recognition of said pattern vs other sound patterns that do not result in a shock. This will enable you to distinguish between mice that are freezing at any sound pattern vs mice that are learning to freeze at a specific sound pattern, otherwise they will recieve a shock.
Also, it is worth noting that humans will chose a negative stimulust (such as a shock) over bordom. I'm not sure if that is the same in mice, but might be worth considering.
To find the paper above I googled ''make mice pay attention to a light''
Best of luck, i've just finished my thesis this evening, I know your pain T_T
I went through that paper once but I'll print it out and read it in detail to see if I skimmed past something in there. I don't think I can use audio to aid and making the mice pay attention to the monitor because this experiment will involve visual pattern discrimination task, audio discrimination task and we plan on combining these task for more specific behavioral tests. It's also low budget (I'm doing this for a 2 month summer program) otherwise I would train mice using other methods that cost money to get their attention to the visual. I'm not worried about audio training as I think that will come more naturally (we don't have to train them to pay attention to sound). Alistair Page
The mice I have trained have been subject to maze learning, passive and active avoidance and so on. I can attach some, they may give you some ideas. As a general rule you cannot fear when you eat so if your mice have some favorite food they will not fear. If they are in the presence of a pup, they do not fear either.
Thanks for the papers, I'll read those ASAP. Fortunately a lot of the mice are sitting in the corner which incidentally makes them face the monitor. I was as persistent as I could be professionally when asking if we can use active avoidance. It would be easier to train and I personally like this model better for what we want but the PI wants to use only one side with one monitor for visual stimuli. I still think with the mice sitting in the corner it'll take a while before the mice realize the patterns on the monitors mean something.
Then you need a circular apparatus so there is no corner to sit in:) However also in a circular apparatus a mouse, a perfect model for the human, can be wall-seeking or not. The degree of wall-seeking (Thigmotaxis) also depends on how much the animal fears or on the light. The mouse is most active during the night and our mice were least active at 9.30 AM Finnish time.
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