Abstract
Cognitive impairment in patients with psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, such as schizophrenia, autism, and dementia, is a serious problem, because of limited effective remedies. In order to understand pathopsysiology of cognitive impairment and develop effective treatment in neuropsychiatric disorders, the appropriate animal model and evaluation assay system are required. Touchscreen-based behavioral analysis has emerged as an automated, translatable, and reproducible approach to assessing cognition in animal models of disease and pharmacological screening. Several reports showed that human disease-related mutant mice exhibited cognitive impairments in touchscreen-based visual discrimination (VD) task. We analyzed cognitive function of animal model for psychiatric disorders using a touchscreen-based VD task. In this review, we introduce touchscreen-based VD and reversal learning tests to analyze cognitive function in animal models for neuropsychiatric disorders.
