0134 Sex Differences in Circadian-linked and Learning Behaviors Among Mice in Socially-housed Automated Home Cages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Introduction Women often report more sleep and circadian misalignment due to biological (e.g., hormones) and/or social (e.g., scheduling demands) factors. Mice are effective model organisms to assess circadian-linked behaviors associated with learning and human sleep due to similarities in sleep cycles. Singly-housed female mice are reported to spend more time awake than male mice and perform learning tasks differently. Despite mice being innately social animals, limited research exists examining circadian-linked behavior in socially-housed mice. Automated home cages allow for continuous monitoring of mice across the circadian cycle. In this study, we aimed to use an automated home cage with socially housed mice to provide naturalistic representation of mouse circadian-linked and learning behaviors that may represent underlying sex differences in human sleep and circadian rhythms. Methods We investigated sex differences in the circadian-linked and learning behaviors between male and female mice. Seventeen socially-housed C57BL/6J mice (9 Male; 8 Female) were continuously monitored using the TSE Intelligcage system. Mice were monitored across 15 days (12:12 light-dark cycle). Animals and cage-interactions (i.e., corner visits indicating circadian-activity; nosepokes indicating learning; and water licks indicating learning) were individually tracked. Water ports with various restrictions (e.g., nosepokes; restricted corner access) assessed learning. We created actograms and learning graphs by tracking mouse interactions and conducted independent sample t-tests to compare both sexes over time and for four hours of diurnal activity each day. Results Both sexes displayed more nocturnal than diurnal activity and biphasic activity. Across the 24-hour day, sex differences emerged with visit durations (females=longer, p< 0.01), licking (males=more, p< 0.01) and lick duration (males=longer, p< 0.001). During the day (rest), females demonstrated higher nosepokes (p< 0.01), visits (p=0.02), and licking (p< 0.01) than males. Females also demonstrated lower accuracy for water port visits (p< 0.05), though total visits considered accurate were comparable to males. Conclusion Consistent with disturbed sleep in women, female mice demonstrated more daytime activity. Differences in female circadian-linked behaviors may indicate biological basis for higher frequencies of some sleep and circadian disorders among women compared to men. Female mice appeared to exhibit more exploratory learning behaviors, but learning based on accuracy was otherwise comparable between sexes. Support (if any)
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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".