An automated two-choice social operant task for probing moment-to-moment changes in social satiety.

ABSTRACT: In naturalistic conditions, animals must routinely make ongoing self-motivated choices about whether to initiate interactions with same or opposite-sex partners and whether to re-initiate social contact when interactions have ended. However, it remains unclear what governs these choices, and whether they are motivated by drive states that exhibit signatures of moment-to-moment social satiety when these interactions have ended. Here, to explicitly test this at the behavioral level, we designed a novel fully-automated two-choice social operant paradigm where individuals can choose between same and opposite-sex social rewards and rewards are delivered for interaction with systematically varying durations. We trained cohorts of both sexes on this task and quantified the patterns of choices. We

SUBMITTER: Mack NR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12338548 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature