Social neuroscience is a new direction in our lab inspired by our naturalistic habitat. The NH is a 10x12x8ft room filled with peat moss bedding and wooden play structures. In recent experiments, we have introduced 8 male rats to the habitat. Upon introduction, the rats freely explore their environment, build tunnels, and interact with conspecifics. Within a week of being introduced to the habitat, Sprague Dawley rats work together to construct tunnels and burrows – revealing a deeply innate behavior that has not been lost despite the advanced domestication of the laboratory rat. This interest in innate, natural behaviors is the major conceptual foundation of our habitat. Rather than placing rats in cages and training them to perform artificial behaviors, we are interested in studying the behaviors that rats actually evolved to perform.
Recently, we’ve started investigating another dimension of behavior: vocal communication. Rats vocalize at ultrasonic frequencies, so we use highly sensitive ultrasound microphones to record their vocalizations. While recording the rats’ calls, we simultaneously track their behaviors with infrared cameras. As we aim to elucidate the relationship between behavior and rat ultrasonic vocalizations, we ask the following questions:
Can we map specific behaviors to specific types of vocalizations?
Are there structural rules that govern how call types are combined?
Does the naturalistic habitat reveal properties of rat vocal and social behavior that may not be apparent under standard laboratory conditions?
