Naturalistic housing condition promotes behavioral flexibility and increases resilience to stress in rats.

Abstract

Behavioral flexibility is an indispensable cognitive ability that allows the adjustment of behavioral responses to different situations, while resilience refers to the capability to deal effectively with stress. On one hand, standard laboratory housing provides impoverished cognitive, sensory, and physical stimulation compared to the conditions found in nature. Conversely, enriched and naturalistic housing conditions offer a broadening in the behavioral repertoire that can be depicted by the animals in their home cages, in addition to enabling a better management of possible stressors. Here, we investigated the effects of environmental enrichment and naturalistic housing compared to the standard laboratory housing on different behavioral tasks, including Morris water maze, open field, object location, and fear conditioning. This allowed us to evaluate how different housing conditions modulate behavioral flexibility and resilience to stress, in addition to spatial memory, in adult male rats. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).