Quantifying mouse social behavior
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1
Howard Hughes Medical Institute - Janelia Farm Research Campus, United States
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2
Caltech, United States
Humans are social creatures, and deficits that impair social interaction can be much more disruptive to individual, family and society, than similarly severe sensory or motor deficits. This makes research into social deficits particularly urgent, but this urgency is hampered by the increased difficulty of modeling complex human social interactions with mouse behavior. Characterizing a social deficit requires first that you have a good idea of what a socially normal mouse looks like. This is partially complicated by the fact that one of the reasons that the mouse is so globally successful is that it is extremely plastic in the types of social behavior it can display. Mice can be successful at very low and very high population densities, deploying the same genetics to handle almost no social interactions or continual social interactions. Social relationships in mice develop over the course of many days, but standard tests of social competence are often brief, involving observation of two mice introduced into a cage for a short period. In addition, standard mouse husbandry allows only a fraction of the full mouse repertoire to be observed in the lab and the social and sexual isolation common in mouse husbandry practice can introduce repetitive/anxiety-related behaviors that may obscure natural behavior. To describe normal mouse social behavior in a quantitative way we have developed a video--based method to track the position and identity of group-housed male and female mice in a 60 cm x 60 cm enclosure over multiple days. Mice are bleach marked to allow unambiguous identification. Four ultrasonic microphones record vocalizations continuously during social interactions.
Keywords:
Mouse,
tracking,
trajectory,
vocalization
Conference:
Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology, College Park. Maryland USA, United States, 5 Aug - 10 Aug, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Invited Symposium (only for people who have been invited to a particular symposium)
Topic:
Social Behavior
Citation:
Egnor
S,
Ohayon
S,
Perona
P and
Taylor
A
(2012). Quantifying mouse social behavior.
Conference Abstract:
Tenth International Congress of Neuroethology.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnbeh.2012.27.00051
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Received:
02 May 2012;
Published Online:
07 Jul 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Dr. S. E. Roian Egnor, Howard Hughes Medical Institute - Janelia Farm Research Campus, Ashburn, United States, roian.egnor@gmail.com