Prosocial decision making in an operant box paradigm promotes visual communication and complex behavioral sequences in adolescent rat dyads
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The adolescence period is marked by intense social play behavior in rats, shown to influence social, cognitive, and emotional processes. The goal of this study was to assess the ability of adolescent rats to display prosocial behaviors through a sharing task and to learn prosociality from vicarious observation. The paradigm involved a pretraining phase, using a two-chamber operant box with two reward differentiated levers on the actor side, providing one and two sucrose pellets respectively upon pressing. Dyads where actors were not exposed to pretraining session acted as controls. The prosocial phase ensued, where an easy lever pressed dispensed one pellet while a hard lever pressed dispensed one reward to both the actor and observer in the adjacent chamber. Actor and observer rats then switched roles enabling vicarious learning assessment. Findings revealed pretraining to be critical for behavior and task contingency in adolescent rats. Complex behavioral sequences marked by increased visual communication between dyads was observed. Despite the diversity of behaviors, observer rats failed to learn prosocial behaviors. This study shows pretraining to act as a key element promoting behavioral interactions; the thorough behavioral analysis performed highlights the ability for adolescent rats to display a richness of behaviors when paired with a congener. Another interesting finding was the ability for rats to learn prosocial behaviors, but the inability to learn such behaviors by observation. These findings call for further studies to understand prosocial behaviors in rodents and their ability to learn such behaviors from a congener.
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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".