A Need for Consistency in Behavioral Phenotyping for ASD: Analysis of the Valproic Acid Model

Table 3

Social interaction test.

Reference	Pretest habituation	Length	Coding methods	Nonsubject animals	Apparatus notes	Behaviors analyzed	Outcome
Markram et al. [8]	Individually housed the night before	20 min	Not specified	Same group, sex, and weight	Contained an “escape” tube large enough for one rat	Pinning, touching, grooming each other, sniffing of anogenital parts and nonanogenital parts	VPA decreased pinning nonanogenital sniffing, and touching bouts. VPA increased hiding time
Kataoka et al. [5]	Resident habituated to cage for 60 min	20 min	Manual from recording (blind)	Unfamiliar ICR mouse, same age	Typical cage	Sniffing, allogrooming, aggression	VPA males decreased sniffing time. VPA females increased sniffing time
Chen et al. [11]	Individually housed the night before	20 min	EthoVision	One VPA-exposed and one saline-exposed; same age, sex, and weight	White plastic box	Sniffing, mounting, grooming	VPA males decreased sniffing frequency and duration
Sgritta et al. [18]	—	Not stated	Manual using ANY-maze (blind)	Age, sex, and treatment matched	Plexiglass box	Following, touching, sniffing, grooming, crawling	Results not reported for VPA