Three-Chamber Sociability Test

The three-chamber sociability test, developed by Crawley and colleagues, is the most widely used paradigm for quantifying social approach behavior and social novelty preference in rodents. The apparatus consists of three interconnected chambers: the subject animal freely explores all three, choosing between a chamber containing a novel conspecific (enclosed in a wire cup) and an empty chamber (or empty wire cup). A second phase tests social novelty preference by introducing a second novel animal, requiring the subject to discriminate between familiar and novel social stimuli.

Primary dependent variables include time spent in each chamber, time spent sniffing each wire cup, number of chamber entries, and a sociability index calculated as (time with social stimulus minus time with empty) divided by total investigation time. For the social novelty phase, a discrimination ratio contrasts investigation of the novel versus familiar conspecific. Locomotor activity and chamber transition patterns serve as control measures for general exploration.

ConductMaze controls the automated door system between chambers, tracks animal position via overhead infrared video, and detects close-proximity nose-point investigation of wire cups using zone-based analysis with configurable sniff radii. The system automates phase transitions between habituation, sociability, and social novelty stages, and computes all social indices in real time with exportable raw trajectory data.