Environmental enrichment

Rats, like humans, are social creatures and their interactions with each other and with their environment can likewise influence or predict cognitive functions. It has been reported that people with extraverted personalities are more social and eager to explore new environments, and are also more impulsive in laboratory tests. This may reflect a lower level of basal arousal and an increased need for stimulation. Likewise male non-human primates who are more impulsive are more likely to reach the very top of the dominance hierarchy or to die trying due to dramatic risk-seeking behaviour (incredibly long leaps from tree to tree, initiating fights with older males etc.) If the same links can be made at the rodent level, this opens up new research possibilities as the neural, neurochemical and molecular basis of such individual differences could be empirically studied.

We are investigating whether housing animals in an enriched environment can exacerbate or inhibit impulsive tendencies, or affect the response to pharmacological challenges, as determined using different cognitive behavioural paradigms (five-choice serial reaction time task, delay-discounting, gambling models). We are also interested in exploring whether the kinds of behaviours which individual animals engage in within an enriched environment are predictive of their levels of impulsivity.

For more information, email info@winstanleylab.com with “Enrichment” in the subject heading.