Experimental Analysis of Operant Learning with Social Reinforcement in Mice

Social reinforcement/reward (SR) procedures in which operant responses are reinforced by the opportunity to interact in some way with other members of the same species (conspecifics) have been developed to study operant social learning in nonhuman animals, particularly with rats. Interest and research on SR procedures have increased in recent years and is being recognized as a potentially valuable way to study social learning in mice, which is the species in which most human conditions involving a social component (e.g., autism spectrum disorder, schizophrenia) are being modeled. However, relatively little experimental analysis of potentially impactful details of SR procedures with mice has occurred. We first describe a pilot SR study conducted with C57BL/6 female mice in which we found 1) operant responding can be established with SR without using food reinforcement/food restriction, 2) SR appears to be more effective when it is with a novel/less familiar conspecific mouse and that this may be due in part to the behavior of the latter, and 3) the ideal duration of contingent SR interactions appears to be between 5-20 s. On the basis of these results, a full study was conducted to further investigate the effects of 1) the novelty/familiarity of conspecifics, 2) pre-session group versus short-term single housing of test mice, and 3) the maintenance of operant responding when SR is discontinued. The results of this study demonstrated that response-contingent contact with alternating conspecifics across sessions sustained more operant responding than when the conspecific was the same across sessions, especially when alternating conspecifics were used during initial training. The effects of pre-session group versus single housing were inconsistent across mice and require further study. There was evidence that the stimuli associated with SR acquire conditioned reinforcing properties, which makes the procedure used in this research potentially useful in studying social conditioned reinforcement in mouse models of human conditions characterized by social deficits.

Level thesis:degree_level

Master’s Degree

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Lopez Medina, Osmar Aaron

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Lewon, Matthew

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Contreras, Bethany
• Jiang, Fang
• Gonzales, Albert

• conditioned reinforcement
• housing
• mice
• operant learning
• social behavior
• social reinforcement

Language dc:language.iso

en_US, English

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://scholarwolf.unr.edu/handle/11714/11911

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarwolf.unr.edu:11714/11911