Disentangling developmental effects of play aspects in rat rough-and-tumble play

Animal play encompasses a variety of aspects, with kinematic and social aspects being particularly prevalent in mammalian play behaviour. While the developmental effects of play have been increasingly documented in recent decades, understanding the specific contributions of different play aspects remains crucial to understand the function and evolutionary benefit of animal play. In our study, developing male rats were exposed to rough-and-tumble (RT) play selectively reduced in either the kinematic or the social aspect. We then assessed the developmental effects of reduced play on their appraisal of standardised human-rat play ('tickling') by examining their emission of 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalisations (USVs). Using a deep learning framework, we efficiently classified five subtypes of these USV across six behaviour states. Our results revealed that rats lacking the kinematic aspect in play emitted fewer USVs during tactile contacts by human and generally produced fewer USVs of positive valence compared to control rats. Rats lacking the social aspect did not differ from the control and the kinematically reduced group. These results indicate aspects of play have different developmental effects, underscoring the need for researchers to further disentangle how each aspect affects animals.

Methods
This contains the raw data collected from the corresponding research as the number of rat 50-kHz USVs during different behavioural states in tickling sessions. The USVs were further classified into subtypes through a machine learning model.