Rat Personality and Behavioral Adjustment to Predictable vs. Unpredictable Environments

A 2026 study by Sophia Marie Quante on figshare investigates how individual differences in exploration affect behavioral and hormonal adjustment in Lister Hooded rats. The dataset includes results from two experiments exposing rats to predictable versus unpredictable food availability and to social partners of matching or mismatching personality. It contains monitored home cage behavior, anxiety-like behavior test results, and repeated measurements of faecal corticosterone metabolite concentrations.

Use Cases

• Analyzing personality-dependent behavioral patterns based on exploration level characterizations.
• Investigating the effect of predictable versus unpredictable food availability on affiliative and agonistic behavior.
• Studying the impact of matched versus mismatched social partners on locomotor activity in behavior tests.
• Examining the relationship between social group restructuring and faecal corticosterone metabolite levels.

Strengths

• Data is derived from two distinct, structured experiments on Lister Hooded rats.
• Includes multiple behavioral measures (home cage monitoring, anxiety tests) and hormonal data (faecal corticosterone metabolites).
• Published under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license, facilitating reuse.
• Dataset is associated with a detailed research description outlining the study's aims and findings.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale analysis.
• The primary data file is a 1.5 MB DOCX document, which may require extraction or conversion for analysis.

Provenance

Source

Sophia Marie Quante, via figshare.

Collection Method

Experimental study involving behavioral characterization, environmental manipulation, and hormonal assay.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-07 07:29:05.