Rats prefer mutual rewards in a prosocial choice task

Pro-sociality, i.e., the preference for outcomes that produce benefits for other individuals, is ubiquitous in humans. Recently, cross-species comparisons of social behavior have offered important new insights into the evolution of pro-sociality. Here, we present a rodent analog of the Pro-social Ch...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors:	Hernandez-Lallement, Julen, van Wingerden, Marijn, Marx, Christine, Srejic, Milan, Kalenscher, Tobias
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Frontiers Media S.A. 2015
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4296215/

id	pubmed-4296215
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-42962152015-01-30 Rats prefer mutual rewards in a prosocial choice task Hernandez-Lallement, Julen van Wingerden, Marijn Marx, Christine Srejic, Milan Kalenscher, Tobias Neuroscience Pro-sociality, i.e., the preference for outcomes that produce benefits for other individuals, is ubiquitous in humans. Recently, cross-species comparisons of social behavior have offered important new insights into the evolution of pro-sociality. Here, we present a rodent analog of the Pro-social Choice Task that controls strategic components, de-confounds other-regarding choice motives from the animals' natural tendencies to maximize own food access and directly tests the effect of social context on choice allocation. We trained pairs of rats—an actor and a partner rat—in a double T-maze task where actors decided between two alternatives only differing in the reward delivered to the partner. The “own reward” choice yielded a reward only accessible to the actor whereas the “both reward” choice produced an additional reward for a partner (partner condition) or an inanimate toy (toy Condition), located in an adjacent compartment. We found that actors chose “both reward” at levels above chance and more often in the partner than in the toy condition. Moreover, we show that this choice pattern adapts to the current social context and that the observed behavior is stable over time. Frontiers Media S.A. 2015-01-15 /pmc/articles/PMC4296215/ /pubmed/25642162 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2014.00443 Text en Copyright © 2015 Hernandez-Lallement, van Wingerden, Marx, Srejic and Kalenscher. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Hernandez-Lallement, Julen van Wingerden, Marijn Marx, Christine Srejic, Milan Kalenscher, Tobias
spellingShingle	Hernandez-Lallement, Julen van Wingerden, Marijn Marx, Christine Srejic, Milan Kalenscher, Tobias Rats prefer mutual rewards in a prosocial choice task
author_facet	Hernandez-Lallement, Julen van Wingerden, Marijn Marx, Christine Srejic, Milan Kalenscher, Tobias
author_sort	Hernandez-Lallement, Julen
title	Rats prefer mutual rewards in a prosocial choice task
title_short	Rats prefer mutual rewards in a prosocial choice task
title_full	Rats prefer mutual rewards in a prosocial choice task
title_fullStr	Rats prefer mutual rewards in a prosocial choice task
title_full_unstemmed	Rats prefer mutual rewards in a prosocial choice task
title_sort	rats prefer mutual rewards in a prosocial choice task
description	Pro-sociality, i.e., the preference for outcomes that produce benefits for other individuals, is ubiquitous in humans. Recently, cross-species comparisons of social behavior have offered important new insights into the evolution of pro-sociality. Here, we present a rodent analog of the Pro-social Choice Task that controls strategic components, de-confounds other-regarding choice motives from the animals' natural tendencies to maximize own food access and directly tests the effect of social context on choice allocation. We trained pairs of rats—an actor and a partner rat—in a double T-maze task where actors decided between two alternatives only differing in the reward delivered to the partner. The “own reward” choice yielded a reward only accessible to the actor whereas the “both reward” choice produced an additional reward for a partner (partner condition) or an inanimate toy (toy Condition), located in an adjacent compartment. We found that actors chose “both reward” at levels above chance and more often in the partner than in the toy condition. Moreover, we show that this choice pattern adapts to the current social context and that the observed behavior is stable over time.
publisher	Frontiers Media S.A.
publishDate	2015
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4296215/
_version_	1613177211361165312

Rats prefer mutual rewards in a prosocial choice task

Similar Items