Rat ultrasonic vocalizations as social reinforcers—Implications for a multilevel model of the cognitive representation of action and rats’ social world
Kalenscher,Tobias Schönfeld,Lisa Maria Löbner,Sebastian Wöhr,Markus van Berkel,Mireille Zech,Maurice Philipp van Wingerden,Marijn
Kalenscher,Tobias
Schönfeld,Lisa Maria
Löbner,Sebastian
Wöhr,Markus
van Berkel,Mireille
Zech,Maurice Philipp
van Wingerden,Marijn
Abstract
Rats are social animals. For example, rats exhibit mutual-reward preferences, preferring choice alternatives that yield a reward to themselves as well as to a conspecific, over alternatives that yield a reward only to themselves. We have recently hypothesized that such mutual-reward preferences might be the result of reinforcing properties of ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) emitted by the conspecifics. USVs in rats serve as situation-dependent socio-affective signals with important communicative functions. To test this possibility, here, we trained rats to enter one of two compartments in a T-maze setting. Entering either compartment yielded identical food rewards as well as playback of pre-recorded USVs either in the 50-kHz range, which we expected to be appetitive or therefore a potential positive reinforcer, or in the 22-kHz range predicted to be aversive and therefore a potential negative reinforcer. In three separate experimental conditions, rats chose between compartments yielding either 50-kHz USVs versus a non-ultrasonic control stimulus (condition 1), 22-kHz USVs versus a non-ultrasonic control stimulus (condition 2), or 50-kHz versus 22-kHz USVs (condition 3). Results show that rats exhibit a transient preference for the 50-kHz USV playback over non-ultrasonic control stimuli, as well as an initial avoidance of 22-kHz USV relative to non-ultrasonic control stimuli on trend-level. As rats progressed within session through trials, and across sessions, these preferences diminished, in line with previous findings. These results support our hypothesis that USVs have transiently motivating reinforcing properties, putatively acquired through association processes, but also highlight that these motivating properties are context-dependent and modulatory, and might not act as primary reinforcers when presented in isolation. We conclude this article with a second part on a multilevel cognitive theory of rats’ action and action learning. The “cascade” approach assumes that rats’ cognitive representations of action may be multilevel. A basic physical level of action may be invested with higher levels of action that integrate emotional, motivational, and social significance. Learning in an experiment consists in the cognitive formation of multilevel action representations. Social action and interaction in particular are proposed to be cognitively modeled as multilevel. Our results have implications for understanding the structure of social cognition, and social learning, in animals and humans.
Description
Funding Information: This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), projects B09 and D03 of CRC 991 ?The structure of representations in language, cognition, and science?. Mireille van Berkel is supported by Volkswagen Freigeist fellowship no. AZ88216. Maurice-Philipp Zech is supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (grant no. KA 2675/5-3). Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2021.
Date
2021
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Publisher
Springer Nature
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Keywords
Cascades, Cognitive representation, Multilevel categorization, Prosocial behavior, Rats, Reinforcement learning, Ultrasonic vocalization
Citation
Kalenscher, T, Schönfeld, L M, Löbner, S, Wöhr, M, van Berkel, M, Zech, M P & van Wingerden, M 2021, Rat ultrasonic vocalizations as social reinforcers—Implications for a multilevel model of the cognitive representation of action and rats’ social world. in Language, Cognition, and Mind. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol. 7, Springer Nature, pp. 411-438. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50200-3_19
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info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess