You are How You Eat: Foraging Behavior as a Potential Novel Marker of Rat Affective State

Area of Science:

• Animal behavior
• Neuroscience
• Animal welfare

Background:

• Effective foraging relies on animals' expectations of rewards, threats, and costs.
• Affective states are thought to influence these expectations and subsequent foraging decisions.
• Foraging behavior offers a potential window into an animal's internal affective state.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if rat foraging behavior can reliably indicate their affective states.
• To examine how environmental manipulations (enrichment, housing, rewards/punishers) impact foraging decisions.

Main Methods:

• Rats performed a foraging task involving decisions to harvest or switch food sources.
• Experiment 1 manipulated housing enrichment and unpredictable treatments.
• Experiment 2 used immediate pre-test rewards (tickling, sucrose) or punishers (air-puff, back-handling).

Main Results:

• Enriched housing led to more trials completed and less switching compared to standard housing.
• Pre-test tickling increased trial completion compared to sucrose delivery.
• Rats exhibited task disengagement ('not work' option), complicating direct interpretation.

Conclusions:

• Foraging behavior in this specific task is not a straightforward indicator of affective state due to task disengagement.
• Environmental enrichment and certain rewards influenced foraging choices, but the 'not work' option limits interpretation.
• Further research is needed to refine foraging tasks for reliable affective state assessment.