Domestication and the Role of Social Play on the Development of Sociocognitive Skills in Rats
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Several studies on rats and hamsters, across multiple laboratories, have shown that limiting play in the juvenile period leads to adults that have physiological and anatomical changes in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and reduced socio-cognitive skills. Peers raised with playful peers have better socio-cognitive skills than animals raised with adult partners. Using Long Evans hooded rats - a commonly used domesticated strain - this relationship has been replicated multiple times. However, when the same paradigm was used with laboratory-reared wild rats, no differences were found between rats reared with peers and ones reared with adults. It has been shown that the key play-generated experiences involved are those related to actively wrestling with a partner and turn taking (as measured by role reversals), which give both partners opportunity to gain the advantage during play fighting. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that wild rat adults provide juveniles more such experiences than do adult Long Evans rats. The asymmetry in the play interactions in adult-juveniles pairs was compared between the two strains. As predicted, wild rat adults initiated more play with the juveniles, wrestled more and provided more opportunities for role reversals. The findings thus support the hypotheses for the observed strain differences in the effects of rearing condition on the mPFC.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".