Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Rats use strategies to make object choices in spontaneous object recognition tasks

Ross, T.W.; Easton, A.

Rats use strategies to make object choices in spontaneous object recognition tasks Thumbnail


Authors



Abstract

Rodent spontaneous object recognition (SOR) paradigms are widely used to study the mechanisms of complex memory in many laboratories. Due to the absence of explicit reinforcement in these tasks, there is an underlying assumption that object exploratory behaviour is ‘spontaneous’. However, rodents can strategise, readily adapting their behaviour depending on the current information available and prior predications formed from learning and memory. Here, using the object-place-context (episodic-like) recognition task and novel analytic methods relying on multiple trials within a single session, we demonstrate that rats use a context-based or recency-based object recognition strategy for the same types of trials, depending on task conditions. Exposure to occasional ambiguous conditions changed animals’ responses towards a recency-based preference. However, more salient and predictable conditions led to animals exploring objects on the basis of episodic novelty reliant on contextual information. The results have important implications for future research using SOR tasks, especially in the way experimenters design, analyse and interpret object recognition experiments in non-human animals.

Citation

Ross, T., & Easton, A. (2022). Rats use strategies to make object choices in spontaneous object recognition tasks. Scientific Reports, 12, Article 16973. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-21537-1

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 28, 2022
Online Publication Date Oct 10, 2022
Publication Date 2022
Deposit Date Oct 4, 2022
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Scientific Reports
Publisher Nature Research
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 12
Article Number 16973
DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-21537-1

Files


Published Journal Article (4.7 Mb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.





You might also like



Downloadable Citations