Kramer Cassandra, Ruble Shannon, Fort Troy D, West Lexe, Diehl Maria M
Department of Psychological Sciences, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2025 Apr 29;20(4):e0321776. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0321776. eCollection 2025.
The platform-mediated active avoidance (PMA) task has been used to study the behavioral and neural mechanisms of a decision-based form of active avoidance. Across 10 days of PMA conditioning, rats learn to avoid a tone-signaled footshock by moving to a safe platform at the cost of forfeiting sucrose reward. Prior studies utilizing the PMA task involved rats learning to avoid alone in a solitary context, but we have recently modified the task to include a social context to determine how social cues may influence PMA acquisition. Additionally, we report novel measures of social interaction that occur during Social Partner PMA conditioning. This protocol provides a detailed methodology for studying active avoidance within solitary and social contexts, as well as key considerations when employing the PMA task.
平台介导的主动回避（PMA）任务已被用于研究基于决策的主动回避形式的行为和神经机制。在10天的PMA条件反射过程中，大鼠学会通过移动到安全平台来避免音调信号提示的足部电击，代价是放弃蔗糖奖励。先前利用PMA任务的研究涉及大鼠在单独环境中学习回避，但我们最近对该任务进行了修改，纳入了社交环境，以确定社交线索如何影响PMA的习得。此外，我们报告了在社交伙伴PMA条件反射过程中发生的社交互动的新测量方法。本方案提供了在单独和社交环境中研究主动回避的详细方法，以及采用PMA任务时的关键注意事项。
