Abstract
Finding an animal model of schizophrenia that displays both reliability and validity is a difficult task. The Maternal Immune Activation (MIA) model is an animal model that mimics an epidemiological risk factor of schizophrenia. While the MIA model has been shown to replicate many of the structural neurological deficits, as well many of the behavioural deficits of the disorder, there is still uncertainty as to how these various deficits are impacting each other. We aimed to test this by examining the cognitive symptom of a deficit in attention and the negative symptom of the deficit in motivation using a task that has been previously shown to assay the interaction between motivation and attention in other animal models of schizophrenia. We generated MIA rats and age matched controls. Using an operant task, we tested the role that signalling a high or low probability of being rewarded on the upcoming trial affected the two group’s behaviour on the task. We found that MIA rats completed the task to the same standard as controls, showing that their behaviour was modulated by the probability of being rewarded on the trial. These results suggest that the MIA model does not fully replicate the motivational, cognitive symptoms observed in patients with schizophrenia. We posit this may be due to the need to implement a two-hit model of the MIA protocol.