Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Shelly Chen

Social Motivations in Prairie Voles

Social motivation in prairie voles can be affected by various factors, such as sickness, social isolation, and partner familiarity. In our lab, we quantitatively measure levels of social motivation by operantly training prairie voles to lever press for rewards and subsequently running social testing trials to analyze how patterns in voles’ social motivation and preferences change under various conditions. I will be involved in the operant conditioning and testing this summer, manually training the voles and collecting behavioral data.

Message To Sponsor

I am super grateful to be given this opportunity to further my URAP journey this summer! The research experience I gained through the program has been extremely meaningful to me as a first-year student, and it helped me find my own passion for research. I am very excited to delve deeper into the topic of social motivation and learn more research skills!