Novel behavioral tasks for the measurement of social motivation in mice: a comparison across strains

When combined with standard social behavior testing, our measures provide more detailed social behavior phenotypes unique to each strain. In addition to allowing the creation of more complete social behavior ethograms, these tasks offer advantages as compared to existing conditioning-based behavior tasks measuring social motivation and reward such as the social conditioned place preference task and operant conditioning for social reward. The weighted door and ladder tasks leverage innate exploration behaviors that do not require prior learning which allows for more models, including those with memory, attention, and learning deficits, to be used. These pre-clinical measures of social motivation may prove useful in improving predictions of social behavior outcomes of proposed pharmacological interventions for clinical populations.