Abstract
Cognitive flexibility, the higher-order cognition involving reversal learning, has been defined as having the ability to shift one’s previous thoughts or actions to new situations depending on situational demands. Studies of neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) showed that restricted and repetitive patterns of activities are associated with the impairments of cognitive flexibility. Some behavioral tasks including attentional set-shifting task are used to assess cognitive flexibility in mouse models for psychiatric disorders (Birrell and Brown, 2000; Colacicco et al., 2002). Here we present a two-choice digging test, which is simplified and modified from set-shifting task, for using mice to study the reversal learning (Huang et al., 2014).
Keywords: Mouse behavior, Cognitive flexibility, Rigidity
Materials and Reagents
Equipment
Software
The GraphPad Prism 5.0 (GraphPad Software) was used to generate the graphs and analyze the data of trials to acquisition and trials to relearn. A p-value less than 0.05 is considered statistically significant.
Procedure
Notes:
Recipes
Acknowledgments
This protocol was adapted from previous works listed in the references.
References
If you have any questions/comments about this protocol, you are highly recommended to post here. We will invite the authors of this protocol as well as some of its users to address your questions/comments. To make it easier for them to help you, you are encouraged to post your data including images for the troubleshooting.
Hi Labeeba,The 2% cinnamon-flavored sawdust is calculated as the fraction of the weight of cinnamon related to the total weight of the cinnamon-flavored sawdust (weight percentage, w/w). I mix ground cinnamon with sawdust to give a 2% (w/w) cinnamon mixture. For example, if I want to prepare 100g 2% cinnamon-flavored sawdust, I measure 2g cinnamon amount and mix the 2g cinnamon with sawdust (~98g) to reach 100g of cinnamon-sawdust mixture. I calculate the weight of sawdust or cinnamon by weighing equipment and put/mix them in a large ziplog bag. I hope these information will be helpful. If you have more questions, I will be happy to provide any information.