Social Transmission of Food Preference in C57BL/6 mice
Year: 2012
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Motivation/Aims Our understanding of memory processes has greatly benefited from animal research. The assessment of learning and memory in rodents has so far intensely relied on simple tests with easily translatable experimental methods, and thus has concentrated largely on spatial tasks. Socially communicated food bias as a semantic knowledge task has been developed in our laboratory as a modified version of the Galef model of food bias induced through the social interaction with a conspecific [1,2]. This constitutes a natural odour-odour association and fulfils criteria of semantic knowledge including the acquisition during an episodic-like learning event, but the information then becomes unrelated to this mouse-mouse interaction and conceptually independent from the learning episode; it is finally declared in a different environmental setting. Such ‘learning from others’ can be employed in rats and mice, is not induced through a simple presentation of the odour cue, is transmitted by an anaesthetised animal and thus not reliant on the social encounter as such. Furthermore, memory for the novel odour is long-lasting (at least 24 hours) and dependent on elements of the temporal lobe as confirmed through hippocampal lesion studies (for example [3]) and more recently through measurement of activated immediate early genes [4]. Olfactory deficits and memory impairments have been linked to several neurological disorders (such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, autism, schizophrenia) with respect to detection, discrimination, recognition and identification [5], hence the need for identifying an early marker for disease prior to clinical manifestations. In the present study, we carefully examined and constructed new methodologies of investigating olfactory memory in mice using the STFP paradigm. Principle manipulations introduced are the automation of the test which allows the recording of a large number of subjects simultaneously during all phases of the test (habituation, social interaction, test of food preference) and improved methods of measuring activity of the subjects by analysing time spent in particular zones of the arena.
Source: Lirias
Institution: University of Aberdeen
Language: English
Topic: Memory and Neural Mechanisms
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2188903806