Self-Grooming

The mice were introduced gently into a clean standard mouse cage with a video camera placed 15 cm away from the cage. Twenty minutes were recorded for the manual scoring of repetitive self-grooming during the second 10 min of the testing session, illuminated at 40 lux. The total amount of time spent grooming, number of grooming bouts and the percentage of incorrect grooming transitions were analyzed by an observer that was blind to the experimental design. The grooming behavioral microstructure was analyzed using a grooming analysis algorithm. A grooming bout consists of the following grooming steps: no grooming (0), paw (1), face (2), body (3), leg (4), tail/genital (5). A complete bout includes an in-order grooming from 0 to 5, without any longer than 6’s interruption and no other behavior during the bout. We defined a sequentially transition move in the correct order, as 0–1, 1–2, 2–3. The incorrect transitions of disordered grooming movements, are defined as 1–3, 4–1 (Kalueff et al., 2007; Pearson et al., 2011). The percentage of incorrect transitions was calculated as incorrect transitions divided by total number of transitions. The cages were cleaned with 70% ethanol between each subjects test session (Silverman et al., 2015).