Week 5 - 7/3/2017

Week 5

This week I went back to working with the Templeton study. This week was also a little more complicated than expected because we had July 4th off and then the fire alarm went off on Wednesday during one of our experiments, so it had to be re-done. Although this week was a bit more complicated, it still was a lot of fun to complete some experiments on the Templeton project rats.

The first experiment of the week was novel environment suppressed feeding. In this experiment, the animals were food deprived for 24 hours, and then given food in their cages. When we gave them food, we first weighed the food, set a timer for 10 minutes, and after 10 minutes weighed the food again to see how much they ate. This experiment went smoothly until the fire alarm went off. I was testing two of the last three cages when this happened. Since the fire alarm is really loud and unexpected, it can stress out the animals just like it can stress out humans. So, we were not able to count the testing on those two cages and decided to hold off on testing the last cage since they were most likely stressed too. Since we had to start the experiment over, they needed to be food deprived again for 24 hours. However, since they had just been food deprived we gave them all food to eat for about an hour. Rats normally eat in intervals so this was a sufficient amount of time to make sure they got the nutrition they needed and wanted. They were then food deprived for 24 hours and completed the experiment the next day.

This week was also largely focused on an experiment called "Novel Object Recognition" or as we like to refer to it, NOR. In this experiment, rats are put in a large black box with two of the same objects. An hour later, they are put in the same box with one object from the previous session and a new object. Videos are taken of the rats during both sessions and are scored to see how much time is spent with each object. This experiment tests the memory of the rats. I like this experiment because although it is simple the timing is crucial. Once the rats are done, within the next 10 minutes the videos have to be saved and the boxes have to be cleaned to prepare for the next rats. It is also very important that when the rats are taken out of the boxes the time is recorded because exactly an hour later they have to be put in for their session with the different objects. 

This week was a really fun week because I got to run many experiments on the Templeton project rats. I also enjoyed it because I learned how to deal with the unexpected and adapt to changing schedules.

NOR box

NOR box