A novel vibrotactile system for stimulating the glabrous skin of awake freely behaving rats during operant conditioning.

Background: Rat skin is innervated by mechanoreceptive fibers similar to those in other mammals. Tactile experiments with behaving rats mostly focus on the vibrissal system which does not exist in humans. The aim of this study was to design and implement a novel vibrotactile system to stimulate the glabrous skin of behaving rats during operant conditioning.

New Method: A computer-controlled vibrotactile system was developed for various tasks in which the volar surface of unrestrained rats' fore- and hindpaws was stimulated in an operant chamber.

Results: The operant chamber was built from off-the-shelf components. A highly accurate electrodynamic shaker with a novel multi-probe design was used for generating mechanical displacements. Twenty-five rats were trained for four sequential tasks: (A) middle-lever (trial start signal) press, (B) side-lever press with an associated visual cue, (C) similar to (B) with the addition of an auditory/tactile stimulus, (D) auditory/tactile detection (yes/no) task. Out of 9 rats which could complete the tactile version of this training schedule, 5 had over 70% accuracy in the tactile version of the detection task.

Comparison With Existing Methods: Unlike actuators for stimulating whiskers, this system does not require a particular head/body alignment and can be used with freely behaving animals.

Conclusions: The vibrotactile system was found to be effective for conditioning freely behaving rats based on stimuli applied on the glabrous skin. However, detection accuracies were lower compared to those in tasks involving whisker stimulation reported previously, probably due to differences in cortical processing.