Short-term auditory priming in freely-moving mice

Shir Sivroni; Hadas E Sloin; Eran Stark

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.107847

Short-term auditory priming in freely-moving mice

iScience. 2023 Sep 7;26(10):107847. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107847. eCollection 2023 Oct 20.

Authors

Shir Sivroni^{1

2

3}, Hadas E Sloin^{1

4}, Eran Stark^{1

4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 6997801, Israel.
² Department of Mathematics, Afeka-Tel Aviv College of Engineering, Tel-Aviv 6910717, Israel.
³ Department of Mathematics, The Open University of Israel, Ra'anana 4353701, Israel.
⁴ Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, Tel-Aviv 6997801, Israel.
⁵ Sagol Department of Neurobiology, Haifa University, Haifa 3103301, Israel.

Abstract

Priming, a change in the mental processing of a stimulus as a result of prior encounter with a related stimulus, has been observed repeatedly and studied extensively in humans. Yet currently, there is no behavioral model of short-term priming in lab animals, precluding research on the neurobiological basis of priming. Here, we describe an auditory discrimination paradigm for studying response priming in freely moving mice. We find a priming effect in success rate in all mice tested on the task. In contrast, we do not find a priming effect in response times. Compared to non-primed discrimination trials, the addition of incongruent prime stimuli reduces success rate more than congruent prime stimuli, suggesting a cognitive mechanism based on differential interference. The results establish the short-term priming phenomenon in rodents, and the paradigm opens the door to studying the cellular-network basis of priming.

Keywords: Behavioral neuroscience; Sensory neuroscience.