The effect of psychedelic microdosing on animal behavior: A review with recommendations for the field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Microdosing, the repeated use of psychedelic substances at low doses, is growing in popularity among recreational consumers. While this practice is associated with many benefits to mood, well-being and health, research in this area is in its early stages and predominantly centered on human applications. In this narrative review, we synthesize the findings from studies investigating the effects of microdosing on the behaviors of three animal species: rats, mice, and zebrafish. A total of 12 studies were identified that implemented a microdosing regimen of LSD, psilocybin, or DMT in these animal models. Overall, microdosing caused little changes in behaviors associated with anxiety- and depressive-like states. Moreover, while microdosing was well-tolerated across species, further research is needed to capture specific safety concerns. Finally, we critically appraise the studies included in this review based on their methodologies and discuss further avenues of research to advance the preclinical literature on psychedelic microdosing. Specifically, we recommend that future research prioritize the replication of existing findings to inform the development of robust study designs and dosing protocols, as well as establish standardized methodologies to enable effective comparisons across different animal models. Furthermore, future investigations should explore the therapeutic potential of mescaline microdosing, examine sex-dependent effects, and extend research to additional models of psychiatric conditions, including those related to obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".