You are How You Eat: Foraging Behavior as a Potential Novel Marker of Rat Affective State

Effective and safe foraging requires animals to behave according to the expectations they have about the rewards, threats, and costs in their environment. Since these factors are thought to be reflected in the animals’ affective states, we can use foraging behavior as a window into those states. In this study, rats completed a foraging task in which they had repeatedly to decide whether to continue to harvest a food source despite increasing time costs, or to forgo food to switch to a different food source. Rats completed this task across two experiments using manipulations designed to induce both positive and negative, and shorter- and longer- term changes in affective state: removal and return of enrichment (Experiment 1), implementation and reversal of an unpredictable housing treatment (Experiment 1), and delivery of rewards (tickling or sucrose) and punishers (air-puff or back-handling) immediately prior to testing (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, rats completed fewer trials and were more prone to switching between troughs when housed in standard, compared to enriched, housing conditions. In Experiment 2, rats completed more trials following pre-test tickling compared to pre-test sucrose delivery. However, we also found that they were prone to disengaging from the task, suggesting they were really choosing between three options: ‘harvest’, ‘switch’, or ‘not work’. This limits the straightforward interpretation of the results. At present, foraging behavior within the context of this task cannot reliably be used as an indicator of an affective state in animals.