This thesis presents the development and preliminary validation of a novel touchscreen-based operant chamber system for assessing social motivation, a key facet of behavior often disrupted in neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. The system features a modular hardware design with interconnected components, including a touchscreen, cameras, door controls, feeders, and weight sensors, all managed by a Raspberry Pi-based software interface. This modularity allows for flexible adaptation to diverse experimental paradigms. The social motivation task involved a shaping phase with three stages of increasing complexity, culminating in mice discriminating between visual stimuli associated with social and non-social interaction.

Despite technical limitations and a restricted sample size, preliminary results indicate that mice can learn the associations required for successful task completion. However, substantial inter-individual variability in learning trajectories and the limited progression to later stages of the shaping protocol underscore the need for further refinement. Potential improvements include adjusting stage transition criteria, enhancing touchscreen sensitivity, and overall robustness of hardware and software. Future research with a larger cohort will be crucial to validate the complete reliability of this paradigm.

Overall, this thesis demonstrates the feasibility of using a touchscreen-based operant chamber system to assess social motivation in mice. With further optimization, this innovative approach holds promise for elucidating the neural mechanisms underlying social behavior and its disruption in disease models, ultimately contributing to the development of novel therapeutic strategies for neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.