Housing conditions and stimulus females: a robust social discrimination task for studying male rodent social recognition

Social recognition (SRSR) enables rodents to distinguish between familiar and novel conspecifics, largely through individual odor cues. SRSR tasks utilize the tendency for a male to sniff and interact with a novel individual more than a familiar individual. Many paradigms have been used to study the roles of the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin in SRSR. However, inconsistencies in results have arisen within similar mouse strains, and across different paradigms and laboratories, making reliable testing of SRSR difficult. The current protocol details a novel approach that is replicable across investigators and in different strains of mice. We created a protocol that uses gonadally intact, singly housed females presented within corrals to group-housed males. Housing females singly before testing is particularly important for reliable discrimination. This methodology will be useful for studying short-term social memory in rodents, and may also be applicable for longer term studies.