Measuring risk-taking in mice: balancing the risk between seeking reward and danger

Dent, Claire, Isles, Anthony Roger ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7587-5712 and Humby, Trevor ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1840-1799 2014. Measuring risk-taking in mice: balancing the risk between seeking reward and danger. European Journal of Neuroscience 39 (4) , pp. 520-530. 10.1111/ejn.12430

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Abstract

Assessing risk is an essential part of human behaviour and may be disrupted in a number of psychiatric conditions. Currently, in many animal experimental designs the basis of the potential 'risk' is loss or attenuation of reward, which fail to capture 'real-life' risky situations where there is a trade-off between a separate cost and reward. The development of rodent tasks where two separate and conflicting factors are traded against each other has begun to address this discrepancy. Here, we discuss the merits of these risk-taking tasks and describe the development of a novel test for mice - the 'predator-odour risk-taking' task. This paradigm encapsulates a naturalistic approach to measuring risk-taking behaviour where mice have to balance the benefit of gaining a food reward with the cost of exposure to a predator odour using a range of different odours (rat, cat and fox). We show that the 'predator-odour risk-taking' task was sensitive to the trade-off between cost and benefit by demonstrating reduced motivation to collect food reward in the presence of these different predator odours in two strains of mice and, also, if the value of the food reward was reduced. The 'predator-odour risk-taking' task therefore provides a strong platform for the investigation of the genetic substrates of risk-taking behaviour using mouse models, and adds a further dimension to other recently developed rodent tests.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics (CNGG) Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute (NMHRI) Psychology Medicine
Subjects:	R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC0321 Neuroscience. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Uncontrolled Keywords:	behavioural phenotyping;mouse behaviour;predator odour;risk-taking behaviour
Additional Information:	Published online before print 28 Nov 2013
Publisher:	Wiley-Blackwell
ISSN:	0953-816X
Last Modified:	25 Oct 2022 08:36
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/53698

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