Megan G. Jackson

The paper investigates strain differences in extrinsic and intrinsic motivation tasks in mice, finding divergent motivational phenotypes across strains.

This study modifies the 3-chamber test to better assess affiliative social motivation in mice by incorporating direct interaction and social status, revealing sex differences and challenges to assumptions about sociability.

This paper develops a hybrid model combining intrinsic and learned behaviours to explain how dopaminergic drugs affect motivation in complex foraging tasks.

This study examines dose selection in animal models of antidepressants and finds that conventional models often use doses higher than clinical equivalents, potentially leading to irrelevant mechanisms being studied.

This study compares the effects of antidepressants on conditioned and innate motivation in mice, finding divergent impacts on reward-seeking behaviors.

Reward learning bias, sucrose preference, and ultrasonic vocalisation assays show that singly housed male C57BL/6 mice in conventional cages exhibit a more positive affective state than group-housed mice.

This paper validates a non-appetitive effort-based foraging task in mice as a measure of motivational state, showing sensitivity to dopaminergic modulation and phenotypic models of motivational deficits.

This study investigates whether aged rats exhibit behavioural deficits relevant to apathy syndrome across multiple domains, finding deficits in cognitive flexibility but not other domains, suggesting aged rats are not a suitable model for age-related apathy.