Hernandez-Lallement Julen, van Wingerden Marijn, Marx Christine, Srejic Milan, Kalenscher Tobias
Comparative Psychology, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine University of Düsseldorf Düsseldorf, Germany.
Front Neurosci. 2015 Jan 15;8:443. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2014.00443. eCollection 2014.
Pro-sociality, i.e., the preference for outcomes that produce benefits for other individuals, is ubiquitous in humans. Recently, cross-species comparisons of social behavior have offered important new insights into the evolution of pro-sociality. Here, we present a rodent analog of the Pro-social Choice Task that controls strategic components, de-confounds other-regarding choice motives from the animals' natural tendencies to maximize own food access and directly tests the effect of social context on choice allocation. We trained pairs of rats-an actor and a partner rat-in a double T-maze task where actors decided between two alternatives only differing in the reward delivered to the partner. The "own reward" choice yielded a reward only accessible to the actor whereas the "both reward" choice produced an additional reward for a partner (partner condition) or an inanimate toy (toy Condition), located in an adjacent compartment. We found that actors chose "both reward" at levels above chance and more often in the partner than in the toy condition. Moreover, we show that this choice pattern adapts to the current social context and that the observed behavior is stable over time.
亲社会行为，即对能为其他个体带来益处的结果的偏好，在人类中普遍存在。最近，社会行为的跨物种比较为亲社会行为的进化提供了重要的新见解。在此，我们提出了一种亲社会选择任务的啮齿动物模拟实验，该实验控制了策略成分，将关注他人的选择动机与动物为最大化自身食物获取量的自然倾向区分开来，并直接测试社会环境对选择分配的影响。我们在双T迷宫任务中训练成对的大鼠——一只行为大鼠和一只伙伴大鼠，在该任务中，行为大鼠要在两个仅在给予伙伴的奖励上有所不同的选项之间做出决定。“自身奖励”选择产生的奖励只有行为大鼠能获取，而“双方奖励”选择会为位于相邻隔室的伙伴（伙伴条件）或无生命玩具（玩具条件）产生额外奖励。我们发现，行为大鼠选择“双方奖励”的比例高于随机水平，且在伙伴条件下比在玩具条件下更频繁地做出此选择。此外，我们表明这种选择模式会适应当前的社会环境，并且观察到的行为随时间推移是稳定的。
