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Housing conditions and stimulus females: a robust social discrimination task for studying male rodent social recognition

Nature Protocols volume 4, pages 1574–1581 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

Social recognition (SR) enables rodents to distinguish between familiar and novel conspecifics, largely through individual odor cues. SR tasks utilize the tendency for a male to sniff and interact with a novel individual more than a familiar individual. Many paradigms have been used to study the roles of the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin in SR. However, inconsistencies in results have arisen within similar mouse strains, and across different paradigms and laboratories, making reliable testing of SR difficult. The current protocol details a novel approach that is replicable across investigators and in different strains of mice. We created a protocol that uses gonadally intact, singly housed females presented within corrals to group-housed males. Housing females singly before testing is particularly important for reliable discrimination. This methodology will be useful for studying short-term social memory in rodents, and may also be applicable for longer term studies.

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Figure 1: The social discrimination task.
Figure 2: Results using different permutations of the social discrimination task.
Figure 3: Performance on the social discrimination task in three lines of knockout (–/−) mice.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Scott Wersinger for his helpful review of an early version of this paper. The authors appreciate the excellent technical support provided by Emily Shepard, James Heath, Anna Brownstein and the Building 49 animal facility. This research was supported by the NIMH Intramural Research Program (Z01-MH-002498-20).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Section on Neural Gene Expression, NIMH, NIH, DHHS, Bethesda, Maryland, USA

    Abbe H Macbeth, Jennifer Stepp Edds & W Scott Young III

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  1. Abbe H Macbeth
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  2. Jennifer Stepp Edds
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Contributions

A.H.M. contributed to study design, measurements, analysis and writing. J.S.E. contributed to measurements and analysis. W.S.Y. contributed to design, analysis and writing.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to W Scott Young III.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Movie

Investigation of females during the social discrimination task. Note the insertion of the subject male’s nose between the bars of both corrals in order to investigate both stimulus females. This can be observed when the male is on the near and far side of the corrals. The beeping heard in the background is the timer used by the experimenter during live scoring; the noise does not seem to adversely affect the subject male’s behavior. (MOV 4379 kb)

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Macbeth, A., Edds, J. & Young, W. Housing conditions and stimulus females: a robust social discrimination task for studying male rodent social recognition. Nat Protoc 4, 1574–1581 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2009.141

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