@misc{,
 copyright={Creative Commons Attribution BY 4.0 license},
 howpublished={online},
 abstract={Rats being social animals express many behaviors that regulate their functioning in a group environment. A very important aspects of intraspecific rat communication are ultrasonic vocalizations (USV). The widely accepted consensus is that USV can be divided into two main groups. First are the 22-kHz calls which are often associated with aversive situations; therefore, they express an internal negative state of the animal. The second group of USV are 50-kHz calls which are associated with the rat’s positive emotional state. The aim of the study was to develop a protocol of operant conditioning using emission of rat 50-kHz USV as operant response. The results showed that all rats analyzed as a one group did not learn in operant conditioning to vocalize in order to receive a reward. Also, control experiments done in parallel demonstrated that rats previously reinforced for USV emission readily acquired nose-pokes as operant responses. As a result of further analysis, two groups of animals emerged depending on the efficacy of operant USV-learning. A minority of rats (n = 15) that were rewarded for 50-kHz USV emission were considered as potentially-learning based on an arbitrary criterion. Majority of rats (n = 61) were considered as non-learning. The potentially-learning rats have shown some changes in behavior which suggested the emergence of an associative process and reinforcement of emission of 50-kHz calls. These changes in behavior could have been the consequence of using the above-mentioned criterion. However, a number of changes in potentially-learning rats were described, which indicated the occurrence of learning and did not result directly from the adopted criterion. Potential reasons of why USV may not easily become an operant response are extensively discussed in the Discussion. The introduction of operant conditioning protocol with rat USV as operant response could become a very useful tool to study rat USV and animal models of human neurological diseases.},
 type={Text},
 URL={http://www.rcin.org.pl/Content/240107/Agnieszka%20Wardak_doktorat_2023_l.pdf},
 keywords={Ultrastonic vocalizations, Operant conditoning},
}