Detailed behavioral results for animals used in electrophysiology studies were recently described (Linsenbardt and Lapish, 2015). Behavioral analyses for the current work were primarily focused on time-locked changes in locomotor behavior in response to the various task stimuli. We were particularly interested in determining if there were differences in behavior between trials in which animals ultimately drank fluid, or did not, as these differences may be related to (or mediated by) computations in the PFC encoding drinking decisions. Head movement speed was positively skewed, so it was first log transformed to normalize. We next evaluated differences between movement speed on a bin-by-bin basis using rank-sum tests, which were followed by Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate (FDR) correction for multiple comparisons. The number of drinking and non-drinking trials were analyzed using two-way repeated measures ANOVA with rat population (P vs Wistar) as the between groups factor and number of drinking/non-drinking trials as the within-subjects factor.
