Evaluating Behavioral Impacts of Disabilities in Mice

Severe physical disabilities will cause false positives in many of the behavioural tasks described above^{34 (link)–37 ,157 (link)–159 (link)}. For example, olfactory deficits will inhibit performance on social approach, social recognition, olfactory discrimination and scent marking tests. Motor dysfunctions will prevent a mouse from active exploration of test environments that require locomotion, including social chambers, T-mazes and holeboards. To rule out artefacts, each new line of mutant mice has to be evaluated on a series of measures of general health, body weight, neurological reflexes, home cage behaviours, open-field activity, rotarod performance, visual forepaw placing, acoustic startle and pain sensitivity^{36 (link),37} . Given the fundamental role of olfaction in mouse social behaviours, social and non-social olfactory abilities are routinely evaluated with multiple tests, including latency to locate buried food, olfactory habituation/dishabituation to non-social and social odours, and preference for social novelty^{44 (link),132 (link)}.