FEATURES OF BEHAVIORAL STUDY OF LABORATORY ANIMALS DURING EXAMINATION OF SPECIFIC ACTIVITY

The study of behavior and cognitive functions is rather difficult to interpret, is time-consuming and has a number of peculiarities both in planning the study and in conducting the tests themselves. For this kind of experiments, Various biomodels are used for such experiments, but this paper we will focus on experiments on the animals most often used in laboratory practice - small laboratory rodents (rats and mice). Most often, there is a need to carry out psychopharmacological studies in order to examine the specific activity of drugs belonging to the group of psychotropic drugs, however, medicine from other pharmacological groups can also have neurotropic activity and expressly influence the behavior and cognitive functions of both animals and humans. The paper highlights the main stages of planning and conducting a study of behavior and cognitive functions, starting with the analysis of power and calculating the sample size, the formation of experimental groups and ending with the features of data interpretation. It also presents the most commonly used psychopharmacological tests, as well as methods for confirming neurological deficits. Thus, it is possible to highlight a number of points enabling the most accurate determination the spectrum of psychotropic action of the studied drugs: The number of animals in groups should be sufficient for statistical analysis and usually ranges from 12 to 14 per group. When forming groups, it is necessary to type the behavior of animals using the Open Field test or its analogue and create groups of animals identical in behavior. When studying the spectrum of psychotropic action, one should not be limited to one or two narrowly targeted tests, but use a whole range of behavioral tests for the most complete picture of the drug's action. When assessing the effect of the drug in some cases, one should not average the results in a group, but use an assessment of the individual change in behavior of each animal.