Abstract Attention is a cognitive domain often disrupted in neuropsychiatric disorders and continuous performance tests (CPTs) are common clinical assays of attention. In CPTs, participants produce a behavioral response to target stimuli and refrain from responding to non-target stimuli. Performance in CPTs is measured as the...
Abstract Effort-based decision-making is impaired in multiple psychopathologies leading to significant impacts on the daily life of patients. Preclinical studies of this important transdiagnostic symptom in rodents are hampered, however, by limitations present in currently available decision-making tests, including the presence of delayed reinforcement and off-target...
Abstract Sustained attention, the ability to focus on an activity or stimulus over time, is significantly impaired in many psychiatric disorders, and there remains a major unmet need in treating impaired attention. Continuous performance tests (CPTs) were developed to measure sustained attention in humans, non-human primates,...
"The need to boost reproducibility was what motivated Marco Prado, a biochemist-turned-neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, to create MouseBytes, an open-access repository of cognitive testing data. When Prado moved into neuroscience to study behavior in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, he was struck...
Abstract Rationale Noradrenergic dysfunction is associated with disorders of impulsivity and inattention. The rodent continuous performance test (rCPT) quantifies changes in attention and impulsivity. Objective To use NA receptor antagonists to examine the roles of NA on attention and impulsivity behaviours measured in the rCPT variable stimulus duration (vSD)...
Abstract Anorexia nervosa has among the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric disorder and is characterized by cognitive inflexibility that persists after weight recovery and contributes to the chronic nature of the condition. What remains unknown is whether cognitive inflexibility predisposes individuals to anorexia nervosa, a...
Abstract Development of more effective treatments for schizophrenia targeting cognitive and negative symptoms has been limited due partly to a disconnect between rodent models and human illness. Ketamine administration is widely used to model symptoms of schizophrenia in both humans and rodents. In mice, subchronic ketamine...
Abstract The trial-unique non-matching to location (TUNL) touchscreen task shows promise as a translational assay of working memory deficits in rodent models of autism, ADHD, and schizophrenia. However, the low-level neurocognitive processes that drive behaviour in the TUNL task have not been fully elucidated. In particular,...
Abstract Learned associations between environmental cues and the outcomes they predict (cue-outcome associations) play a major role in behavioral control, guiding not only which responses we should perform, but also which we should inhibit, in order to achieve a specific goal. The encoding of such cue-outcome...
Abstract Touchscreen-based procedures are increasingly used in experimental animal research. They not only represent a promising approach for translational research, but have also been highlighted as a powerful tool to reduce potential experimenter effects in animal studies. However, to prepare the animals for a touchscreen-based test,...