PDF(Pubmed)
Abstract：
Motivation to seek social interactions is inherent to all social species. For instance, even with risk of disease transmission in a recent pandemic, humans sought out frequent in-person social interactions. In other social animals, socialization can be prioritized even over water or food consumption. Zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata, are highly gregarious songbirds widely used in behavioural and physiological research. Songbirds, like humans, are vocal learners during development, which rely on intense auditory learning. Aside from supporting song learning, auditory learning further supports individual identification, mate choice and outcome associations in songbirds. To study auditory learning in a laboratory setting, studies often employ operant paradigms with food restriction and reinforcement and require complete social isolation, which can result in stress and other unintended physiological consequences for social species. Thus, in this work, we designed an operant behavioural method leveraging the sociality of zebra finches for goal-directed behaviours. Our approach relies on visual social reinforcement, without depriving the animals of food or social contact. Using this task, we found that visual social reinforcement was a strong motivational drive for operant behaviour. Motivation was sensitive to familiarity towards the stimulus animal and higher when engaging with a familiar versus a novel individual. We further show that this tool can be used to assess auditory discrimination learning using either songs or synthetic pure tones as stimuli. As birds gained experience in the task, they developed a strategy to maximize reward acquisition in spite of receiving more punishment, i.e. liberal response bias. Our operant paradigm provides an alternative to tasks using food reinforcement and could be applied to a variety of highly social species, such as rodents and nonhuman primates.
摘要：
寻求社会互动的动机是所有社会物种固有的。例如,即使在最近的大流行中有疾病传播的风险，人类寻求频繁的面对面社交互动。在其他社会动物中，社会化甚至可以优先于水或食物消费。斑马雀,Taeniopygiaguttata,是在行为和生理研究中广泛使用的高度群居的鸣鸟。鸣鸟,像人类一样，在发展过程中是声乐学习者，依赖于强烈的听觉学习。除了支持歌曲学习，听觉学习进一步支持个人识别，鸣鸟的配偶选择和结果关联。要在实验室环境中学习听觉学习，研究通常采用食物限制和强化的操作范式，需要完全的社会隔离，这可能会给社会物种带来压力和其他意想不到的生理后果。因此，在这项工作中，我们设计了一种有效的行为方法，利用斑马雀的社会性来实现目标导向行为。我们的方法依赖于视觉社会强化，不剥夺动物的食物或社会接触。使用此任务，我们发现视觉社会强化是操作行为的强大动机。动机对对刺激动物的熟悉程度很敏感，并且在与熟悉的人和新奇的人交往时更高。我们进一步表明，该工具可用于评估使用歌曲或合成纯音作为刺激的听觉辨别学习。随着鸟类在任务中获得经验，他们制定了一种策略，以最大化获得奖励，尽管受到更多的惩罚，即自由主义反应偏见。我们的操作范式为使用食物强化的任务提供了替代方案，可以应用于各种高度社会的物种，如啮齿动物和非人灵长类动物。
