The relationship between play behavior and decisional impulsivity

Abstract

The possibility to play in the juvenile and adolescent phase of animals and humans is crucial for a normal maturation- and development process to adulthood. Play deprivation may result in aberrant behavior or even psychical problems, accompanied with impaired cognitive control over behavior and enhanced impulsivity. To investigate the correlation between play behavior and impulse control, rats were categorized in subgroups of high-, medium- and low players based on their tendency to play in weeks 4 and 5 after birth. A recent study showed no correlation between play behavior and impulsive actions in the five-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT). The aim of this study is to determine whether individual differences in social play behavior are related to impulsive choice behavior, using the delayed reward test. In the delayed reward test the rats have to choose between an immediate small reward or a delayed large reward, whereby the delay increases within and between sessions. The test is divided over 4 phases. In each phase the delay increases within a session to 12, 24, 48 and 60 seconds. When an individual chooses the smaller immediate reward over the large delayed reward as delays are increasing in duration, this can be considered to reflect augmented impulsive choice behavior. After analyzing the data of this study, the results show no significant difference between the low-, medium- and high players in the preference for the large reward depended on the duration of the delay. In conclusion, according to this study there is no direct relation between play behavior in the juvenile and early adolescent stages of rats and decisional impulsivity.