Background
Aims
Prenatal maternal stress refers to the physiological and behavioural responses of a mother animal to environmental challenges during pregnancy or lactation, leading to alterations in the prenatal environment. This type of stressor influences offspring behaviour, physiology and cognition. When one deep-dives into already existing literature about how prenatal maternal stress influences offspring, it has been seen to have diverse effects on offspring behaviour. Yet, its effects vary among studies and individuals. Behaviour is liable and contextual. Yet previous studies that investigate how maternal stress affects behaviour rely only on one or two measurements per individual. This approach potentially overlooks significant intra-individual variation.
While numerous studies address how prenatal maternal stress affects offspring behaviour, few examine its affect on behavioural habituation specifically. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how prenatal maternal stress affects offspring behavioural habituation. We also wanted to test during multiple days to account for intra-individual variation because habituation has been seen not only to vary between individuals in the same population but also to vary within individuals of said population.
