Social Discrimination Test

The social discrimination test (also called social recognition memory) measures the ability of a rodent to distinguish between familiar and novel conspecifics based on olfactory and multisensory cues. During a sample phase, the subject investigates a juvenile or adult stimulus animal. After a variable inter-exposure interval, the subject is presented with the familiar animal alongside a novel individual. Preferential investigation of the novel conspecific indicates intact social memory, while equal investigation suggests a recognition deficit.

Key dependent variables include the discrimination ratio (novel investigation minus familiar divided by total investigation), absolute investigation times of each stimulus, and the decay of social memory across increasing inter-exposure intervals to establish a forgetting curve. Investigation behavior is defined as direct anogenital or facial sniffing within a proximity threshold. The paradigm is exquisitely sensitive to hippocampal and oxytocin system manipulations.

ConductMaze manages stimulus animal containment in perforated cylinders, automates the transition between sample and test phases with motorized doors, and uses nose-point proximity tracking to quantify directed sniffing without manual scoring. The system controls inter-exposure interval timing and can run multiple delay conditions across sessions, generating complete social memory retention curves with standardized methodology.