DOI: 10.5061/dryad.3j9kd51sd
title: Disentangling developmental effects of play aspects in rat rough-and-tumble play

description: Animal play encompasses a variety of aspects, with kinematic and social
 aspects being particularly prevalent in mammalian play behaviour. While
 the developmental effects of play have been increasingly documented in
 recent decades, understanding the specific contributions of different play
 aspects remains crucial to understand the function and evolutionary
 benefit of animal play. In our study, developing male rats were exposed to
 rough-and-tumble (RT) play selectively reduced in either the kinematic or
 the social aspect. We then assessed the developmental effects of reduced
 play on their appraisal of standardised human-rat play
 ('tickling') by examining their emission of 50-kHz ultrasonic
 vocalisations (USVs). Using a deep learning framework, we efficiently
 classified five subtypes of these USV across six behaviour states. Our
 results revealed that rats lacking the kinematic aspect in play emitted
 fewer USVs during tactile contacts by human and generally produced fewer
 USVs of positive valence compared to control rats. Rats lacking the social
 aspect did not differ from the control and the kinematically reduced
 group. These results indicate aspects of play have different developmental
 effects, underscoring the need for researchers to further disentangle how
 each aspect affects animals.
description: This contains the raw data collected from the corresponding
 research as the number of rat 50-kHz USVs during different behavioural
 states in tickling sessions. The USVs were further classified into
 subtypes through a machine learning model.
description: # Disentangling developmental effects of play aspects in rat
 rough-and-tumble play
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3j9kd51sd](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3j9kd51sd) This dataset accompanies the manuscript titled "Disentangling developmental effects of play aspects in rat rough-and-tumble play". It contains all the raw data, analysis scripts, and supplementary materials required to replicate the study's findings: 1. One CSV file containing the 50-kHz USV data collected during the study. 2. One CSV file with weight data for animal welfare. 3. Two R scripts for USV detection, statistical analysis and data visualisation. 4. One DOCX file with supplementary analysis that supports the main findings. 5. One PDF file following the ARRIVE guidelines checklist to ensure ethical reporting of live animal research. ## Description of the data and file structure **Liu et al_Disentangling developmental effects of play aspects in rat rough-and-tumble play_raw data.csv**: This CSV file contains the raw 50-kHz data collected during the study. It includes the following columns: | Rat\_ID | Treatment | Session\_ID | Date | Behavioural state | USV | count | BehaviouralState\_duration | Day | order | | :------ | :-------- | :---------- | :--- | :---------------- | :-- | :---- | :------------------------- | :-- | :---- | Rat_ID contains the individual rat ID; Treatment indicates the treatment group; Session_ID indicates the ID of the tickling session; Date contains the date of the session; Behavioural state labels one of five behavioural states. USV labels USV subtypesl; Count is the total number of 50-kHz USVs; BehaviouralState_duration contains the duration of this behavioural state; Day indicates which concecutive day this session had been with this individual; Order contains the tickling order of this individual. **Liu et al_Disentangling developmental effects of play aspects in rat rough-and-tumble play_Rat weights.csv**: This CSV file includes weight measurements of the subjects used in the study from the start to the end of the experiment. Rats were weigned weekly and the numbers are in grams. **Liu et al_Disentangling developmental effects of play aspects in rat rough-and-tumble play_Supplementary script_analysis.R**: This script contains code for the primary statistical analyses performed in the study, including data cleaning procedures, descriptive statistics, model construction and selection, and visualisation of data. **Liu et al_Disentangling developmental effects of play aspects in rat rough-and-tumble play_USV Spectrogram_cutting.R**: This script is used to detect and extract USVs from our recordings. **Liu et al_Disentangling developmental effects of play aspects in rat rough-and-tumble play_Supplementary Tables and Figure.docx**: This document contains supplementary table 1-6 for USV annotation, ethogram, best model analysis details and Emmeans for all significant interactions. This file also contains supplementary figure 1 & 2 for boxplots of the total number of USVs by behavioural state and USV subtype, and the three-way interaction between the treatment, behavioural state and USV subtype. **Liu et al_Disentangling developmental effects of play aspects in rat rough-and-tumble play_ARRIVE_checklist.pdf**: This PDF file contains the completed ARRIVE guidelines checklist for the study, ensuring that all necessary information for the ethical and transparent reporting of live animal research has been provided. ## Sharing/Access information The machine learning model used to classify USV subtypes can be openly accessed via: [https://universe.roboflow.com/ratcat/rat_usv](https://universe.roboflow.com/ratcat/rat_usv)