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Updated: Jan 9, 2026
Recording Mouse Ultrasonic Vocalizations to Evaluate Social Communication
Published on: June 5, 2016
Assessment of ultrasonic vocalization-mediated communication deficits in AD rats: A social learning paradigm using
Xinxiang Su1, Junjun Pu2, Jinxia Liao2
1Guilin Medical University, Guilin 541199, China; Guangxi Reproductive Medical Center, the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning 530021, China.
Objective:
This study aimed to explore the effect of Alzheimer's disease (AD) rats on the drinking behavior of Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats and observe the ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) of AD rats and SD rats.
Methods:
The 12 AD rats were equally divided into two groups (6 rats per group), and the 36 SD rats were divided into 6 groups (6 rats per group), with no rat reused across different experimental groups. Two independent experimental tasks were conducted: 1) A test field with a sugar area (containing 10 % sucrose solution) and a chili area (containing 0.02 % capsaicin solution) was constructed. The drinking behavior of SD rats (placed in the middle area of the test field) was recorded in the presence of different "guiding rats" (placed in the side area of the test field). The experiment was divided into 5 groups: unguided group (UG, no guiding rats in the side area), normal SD rats guiding group (NG), AD rats guiding group (ADG), AD rats guiding group with memantine administration (ADMG), and the Ultrasonic Vocalizations Guiding Group (USVsG, an animal ultrasonic sound player was used to broadcast the USVs). Additionally, the escape latency results of the Morris water maze test, a commonly used cognitive evaluation task in AD rats, were compared and correlated with the drinking behavior results - the core hypothesis here was to verify whether the drinking behavior method established in this study could serve as a valid tool for assessing AD behavioral phenotypes, consistent with the evaluation effect of the traditional Morris water maze. 2) USV characteristics of SD rats, AD rats, and memantine-administered AD rats were recorded and analyzed separately.
Results:
Compared with the UG, the NG had more drinking bouts in the sugar area and fewer in the chili area. In contrast, the ADG showed the opposite trend vs. NG, indicating impaired social information transmission in AD rats. For USVs, normal SD rats had environment-specific frequency differentiation: dominant high-frequency USVs in sugar-water and low-frequency ones in chili-water, while AD rats had disorganized USV frequency bands. After memantine intervention, ADMG had enhanced sugar preference, shortened Morris water maze escape latency, and USV frequencies gradually approaching normal SD rats. Moreover, USVsG had no obvious difference in drinking behavior vs. NG, confirming USVs as the core medium of social guidance.
Conclusion:
This study reveals AD rats' abnormal USV characteristics, preliminarily lays an experimental basis for an evaluation method combining USVs and drinking behavior, provides a new non-invasive, low-cost perspective for assessing AD rats' behavioral phenotypes, and verifies this method correlates with traditional cognitive evaluation (Morris water maze) and can effectively reflect the improvement of AD behavioral phenotypes after memantine intervention.
