Mental health disorders often emerge during adolescence and are linked to changes in brain chemistry, including serotonin. Understanding how serotonin affects cognitive development requires reliable animal research. Traditional testing methods rely heavily on human intervention, which can introduce stress and bias.
This thesis presents the development and validation of an automated social home-cage system that allows rats to perform touchscreen-based cognitive tasks voluntarily within their living environment. The system reduces human interference and enables continuous behavioral monitoring. The results demonstrate that the automated system produces stable and reproducible cognitive measurements. Furthermore, rats with low serotonin levels show distinct patterns in behavioral development during adolescence. By combining automation, animal welfare improvements, and cognitive neuroscience, this research provides a more naturalistic and reliable way to study the biological foundations of mental health disorders.
Armen Andreasyan (1993) studied clinical psychology and psychophysiology before starting his PhD at Radboud university medical center. His research focuses on developing automated behavioral systems for translational neuroscience. He combines neuroscience, engineering, and programming to improve experimental reliability and bridge animal research with human mental health applications.