Place Preference Cage

Place Preference Cage : View from above

Presentation

BIOSEB Place Preference Box is a standard experimental chamber for automated assessment of conditioned place preference and aversion in rodents, two tests widely used for screening the reinforcing properties of drugs (or natural stimuli) as well as for investigating the brain neurobiological systems implicated in reward and addition.

The purpose of the Conditioned Place Preference test is to characterize the rewarding potential of a drug or other experimental condition.

The procedure involves operant conditioning of a preference for a particular environment that has been consistently paired with a subjective internal state induced by the tested substance or condition. If a drug has marked rewarding properties, the animal will spend more time in the compartment with which it was paired when subsequently tested without the drug. The conditioned place preference procedure is classically used for a long time to test the addictive liability of putative drugs of abuse in research as well as in pharmaceutical industry. The procedure may also be modified to determine whether genetically modified animals are more or less sensitive to the reinforcing effects of a drug.

Operating principle

The experimental box consists of two Perspex compartments of the same size interconnected by a central grey corridor.

The compartments can be differentiated by both visual and tactile cues: the colour of the walls in each compartment (white or black) and the texture of the floors (smooth or rough). The box is provided with transparent frontal walls which may be covered with extractable opaque covers (included). Manually operated sliding doors are provided to manage the access to the two compartments from the corridor.