Punishment Risk Task: Monitoring anxiogenic states during goal directed actions in mice

Abstract

Canonical preclinical studies of anxiety-related behavioral states have been critical to developing mechanistic insights and therapeutics for neuropsychiatric disorders. Most of these assays use exploration of novel spaces to test approach-avoidance conflicts such as the open field test, elevated plus maze, and light-dark box. However, these assays cannot evaluate complicated behaviors in which competing states of motivation result in anxiogenic behaviors. Furthermore, these assays can only test the approach-avoidance conflict once due a reliance on spatial novelty. Here we demonstrate the punishment risk task in male and female, group- and singly-housed mice, a model initially described in singly-housed male rats by Park and Moghaddam (2017). The task tests how probabilistic punishment affects reward-seeking behavior. In particular, it measures the delay to pursue a reward while the likelihood of punishment actively impinges reward-associated actions. Elucidating how these competitive behavioral states are integral to adaptive behavior and change over time and experience to coordinate anxiogenesis should greatly benefit anxiety disorder research. Specifically, implementing this assay in mice will enable cell-type selective interrogation of these processes and further our understanding of the neural basis of anxiogenesis.

Aging reduces motivation through decreasedBdnfexpression in the ventral tegmental area

“…1G). Additionally, in the EPM, social isolation increased travel distances and percentages of moving times in the close arm in both young and old mice, as we observed previously ( 14 ), whereas there were no differences between young and old mice (fig. S2, A to C).…”