Hello all!
I'm learning the ropes of cocaine self-administration, extinction, and cue-induced reinstatement in rats. My current group is almost finished with extinction, and will be ready for reinstatement soon. We use cue-induced reinstatement, where the house light, tone, and cue light are all functional but no drug infusion is delivered upon lever pressing. Another lab member runs each rat undergoing reinstatement alone, in its own separate session. He doesn't run all the reinstatement rats together as one session nor does he run the reinstatement rat with a drug group (though it is the same program with the drug pump turned off). He says that the tones from the other rats receiving either real or fake infusions will influence reinstatement. I can see where having one of the cues presented externally might trigger reinstatement at first, but is the effect large enough to warrant each rat having its own isolated session? What is the standard of practice in your lab? Any input anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated!
Hi,
We typically load the animals undergoing reinstatement first, and then animals that are still undergoing extinction after so that they don't hear the tones. However, we keep all the animals in a seperate room. The typical medpc boxes are protected from outside noise via a fan and the boxes themselves are noise insulated. So there shouldn't be any problem with running multiple reinstatement animals at the same time.
It might be a good idea to run your extinction rats separately so to not interfere with their extinction learning, although I have run cue-reinstatement testing alongside extinction before within the same session (across different boxes) and didn't notice any issues. That being said, I don't see a problem running multiple rats for cue-reinstatement within the same session. The rats learn to self-administer drug (with the paired contingent cues) alongside all the other rats, and they are possibly hearing the cues from the other boxes during this learning process. This experience in and of itself could be a salient cue as well! I guess it could depend on the specific question you're trying to answer. For example, if you were trying to measure cue-dependent, second-by-second neurochemical recordings in real time during a reinstatement session, having potentially salient "background noise" coming from other boxes could introduce some variability perhaps. For most purposes though, I don't see why it would be a significant issue to run multiple reinstatement tests across different boxes within the same session.
Hello,
I haven't had any issues running multiple rats in the same cue-reinstatement session. If they have individual boxes, and they have their own individual lights and cues, I wouldn't anticipate a problem. This being said we use standard boxes that are noise-canceling. As mentioned earlier, its really important what is the specifics you are looking for when the cue -reinstatement is induced.
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