Shuttle Box Active/Passive Avoidance Protocol

Summary

The shuttle box task has been used to study conditioning in non-human animals for over seventy years. Shuttle box tests of avoidance and escape from aversive stimulus are used in contemporary research because these behavioral assays are efficient and standardized methods for testing learning and memory processes. Two types of procedures are generally used:

Active avoidance

A stimulus signals that an aversive stimulus is imminent, and the subject learns to avoid the aversive stimulus by moving to the other side of the two-compartment chamber after the presentation of the stimulus.
The primary dependent measures include whether the subject escapes the aversive stimulus or avoids the presentation of the aversive stimulus entirely by using the stimulus to predict its occurrence.

Passive avoidance

The subject is motivated (trained) to move to the preferred side of the two-compartment chamber. The subject is then confined to the dark portion of the chamber, and experiences inescapable aversive stimulus. The subject is removed, and placed back into the light portion of the chamber for testing.
Then, for the test, the subject is allowed free access to the dark side of the chamber. If the inescapable aversive stimulus during the training phase was sufficient to produce conditioning, then this should be evidenced by increased latencies to enter the dark side of the chamber during the test.

• User-defined parameters include:
  • Number of trials to run
  • Available stimuli
  • Avoid/escape intervals
  • CS/UCS overlap to punish ITI crossings flags
  • Maximum session time
• Data are created with variables including:
  • Trial number
  • Avoids/escapes
  • Avoid/escape latency
  • Left/right chamber activity
  • Crossings and/or punished crossings
  • Total inter-Trial interval shocks
• To run these protocols in our extra-large shuttle box (ENV-010MXL), a modified version is available (SOF-700RA-30)