ArticlesHigh-Frequency Ultrasonic Vocalizations Index Conditioned Pharmacological Reward in Rats
Section snippets
Experiment 1
Experiment 1 was designed to determine whether an environment associated with AMPH treatment would facilitate 50-kHz USVs. We were also interested in determining whether USVs versus place-preference measures would exhibit comparable sensitivity as markers of prior AMPH treatment.
Experiment 2
As with Experiment 1, Experiment 2 was designed to determine whether an environment associated with prior MORPH treatment would elicit increased 50-kHz USVs, even after correcting for place preference.
General discussion
These studies are the first to demonstrate that 50-kHz USVs may serve as a marker of pharmacological reward. Rats made more 50-kHz USVs in the chamber where they had previously received a rewarding compound (i.e., AMPH and MORPH), even after statistically controlling for differences in chamber occupancy. Within groups, the proportion of vocalizations that rats made on the drug-paired side was correlated with place preference, suggesting that the two measures indexed a similar construct.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported in part by NIMH Postdoctoral Training Grant MH18931 to Brian Knutson, and NIMH Grant HD30387 to Jaak Panksepp. Additional support for was provided by Wright–Patterson Contract #F336016 and ONR Grant NOOO14-96-1-0589. We thank Douglas Pruitt for consultation on design issues and two anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript.
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