A Mouse's Spontaneous Eating Repertoire Aids Performance on Laboratory Skilled Reaching Tasks: A Motoric Example of Instinctual Drift With an Ethological Description of the Withdraw Movements in Freely-Moving and Head-Fixed Mice.

A Mouse's Spontaneous Eating Repertoire Aids Performance on Laboratory Skilled Reaching Tasks: A Motoric Example of Instinctual Drift With an Ethological Description of the Withdraw Movements in Freely-Moving and Head-Fixed Mice. Behav Brain Res. 2017 Sep 27;: Authors: Whishaw IQ, Faraji J, Agha BM, Kuntz JR, Metz GAS, Mohajerani MH Abstract Rodents display a spontaneous "order-common" pattern of food eating: they pick up food using the mouth, sit on their haunches, and transfer the food to the hands for handling/chewing. The present study examines how this pattern of behavior influences performance on "skilled-reaching" tasks, in which mice purchase food with a single hand. Here five types of withdraw movement, the retraction of the hand, in three reaching tasks: freely-moving single-pellet, head-fixed single-pellet, and head-fixed pasta-eating is described. The withdraw movement varied depending upon whether a reach was anticipatory, no food present, or was unsuccessful or successful with food present. Ease of withdraw dependent upon the extent to which animals used order-common movements. For freely-moving mice, a hand-to-mouth movement was assisted by a mouth-to-hand movement and food transfer to the mouth depended upon a sitting posture and using the other hand to assist food holding, both order-common movements. In the head-fixed single-pellet task, with postural and head movements prevented, withdraw was made with difficulty a...
Source: Behavioural Brain Research - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Behav Brain Res Source Type: research