Magara Fulvio, Boury-Jamot Benjamin, Hörnberg Hanna
Centre for Psychiatric Neuroscience, Department of Psychiatry, Lausanne University Hospital, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Molecular and Cellular basis of Behavior, Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, Germany.
Bio Protoc. 2021 Aug 5;11(15):e4108. doi: 10.21769/BioProtoc.4108.
The ability to adapt one's behavior in response to changing circumstances, or cognitive flexibility, is often altered in neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions. In rodents, cognitive flexibility is frequently assessed using associative learning paradigms with a reversal component. The majority of existing protocols rely on unrestrictive exploration with no discouragement of wrong responses and are often influenced by spatial cues, at least during the test's learning phase. Here, we present a rewarded contingency discrimination learning test that minimizes the task's spatial component and contains an element that actively discourages pure exploratory responses. The method described herein is a manual version that can be performed using home-made equipment, but the test setup is amenable to automatization and can be adapted to address more complex cognitive demands, including conditional associative learning, attentional set formation, and attention shifting.
个体根据变化的环境调整自身行为的能力，即认知灵活性，在神经精神疾病和神经发育疾病中常常发生改变。在啮齿动物中，认知灵活性通常使用具有反转成分的联想学习范式进行评估。现有的大多数实验方案依赖于无限制的探索，不抑制错误反应，并且至少在测试的学习阶段常受空间线索的影响。在此，我们提出一种奖励性偶然辨别学习测试，该测试将任务的空间成分降至最低，并包含一个积极抑制纯探索性反应的元素。本文所述方法是一个手动版本，可使用自制设备进行操作，但测试设置适合自动化，并且可以进行调整以满足更复杂的认知需求，包括条件联想学习、注意力集形成和注意力转移。
