How to Control Behavioral Studies for Rodents-Don't Project Human Thoughts onto Them

Abstract

In neuroscience research, we often use behavior as an easy tool and assume a straightforward relationship between memory and behavior. However, many factors are often not accounted for and need to be considered when interpreting a behavioral outcome. This opinion article will discuss factors in rodent studies such as handling and how the animal views the world, that will affect whether memory leads to a certain behavior.

Keywords: behavior; memory; mice; rats.

Figure 1.

A, Many researchers think of behavior as a direct readout from, for example, memory and believe that since the memory has to be present for a certain behavior, the reverse logic is also true: if the behavior is not present, the memory must not be present as well. B, But actually, one can only draw the logical conclusion that memory may lead to a certain behavior if the behavior expressed is influenced by many other factors as well.

Figure 2.

How rats see the world. Rats (and mice) are very short-sighted and do not have the receptors for the color red. While they have the receptors for other colors, they do not naturally pay attention to them. Thus, what they see is very different from what we see, which will affect how they will perceive certain visual cues used in experiments. Top, Left to right, what a human would see, a pigmented rat (e.g., Lister Hooded or Long–Evans strains) would see and what an albino rat would see. Taken from http://www.ratbehavior.org/RatVision.htm.