Social Reward Chamber

Operant social preference (OSP) is a novel task used to determine social preferences using a social reward chamber. The Social Reward Chamber is designed to understand the effect of social rewards on the social preferences of the subject. Unlike the existing models that are exclusively based on Conditioned Place Preference (CPP) paradigm and require memory association (Trezza et al., 2011), the Social Reward Chamber is based on Operant Social Preference (OSP) task that takes advantage of visual stimulus (Borland et al., 2017).

The apparatus makes use of clear acrylic chamber that is divided into one large and two smaller chambers that are separated by one-way vertical-swing doors. The doors can be weighted to increase the degree of effort required by the subject. The presence or absence of stimuli in the smaller chambers allows for the direct investigation of the effect of a social stimulus in reinforcing social interactions and in the quantification of reward value.

Social Reward Chamber model also makes for an excellent template, to base pre-clinical studies of psychiatric disorders, to assess the role of social rewards and mechanisms controlling social reward.