The assessment of sexual behavior in male rats with the aim of unraveling underlying neurobiological mechanisms has in the recent decades been reduced to the annotation of mounts, intromissions and ejaculations. To provide a better understanding of the structure and patterns of copulation, it is necessary to extend and tailor the analysis to the natural organization of male rat copulation. This will lead to better formulation of hypotheses about neurobiological underpinnings of behavior. Mounts and intromissions are naturally organized in mount bouts consisting of one or more copulatory behaviors and are interspersed with time outs. We hypothesized that time outs and the post-ejaculatory interval (inter-copulatory intervals) are related and possibly under the control of a common copulatory inhibition mechanism that is the result of penile sensory stimulation. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed sexual behavior in male rats of three different cohorts from three different laboratories. Results showed that the post-ejaculatory interval and mean time out duration are strongly correlated in all cohorts analyzed. In addition, we showed that individual time out duration is at least partially predicted by the sum of sensory stimulation of copulatory components in the preceding mount bout, with more penile stimulation associated with longer time outs. These findings suggest that both time out and post-ejaculatory interval duration may be determined by the magnitude of sensory stimulation, which inhibits copulation. Whether the same neural pathways are involved in the central orchestration of both time outs and the post-ejaculatory interval should be subject to future studies.

近几十年来，旨在揭示潜在神经生物学机制的雄性大鼠性行为评估已减少到对坐骑、插入和射精的注释。为了更好地了解交配的结构和模式，有必要根据雄性大鼠交配的自然组织扩展和调整分析。这将导致更好地制定关于行为的神经生物学基础的假设。坐骑和介绍自然地组织在由一种或多种交配行为组成的坐骑较量中，并穿插着超时。我们假设超时和射精后间隔（交配间隔）是相关的，并且可能受阴茎感觉刺激结果的常见交配抑制机制的控制。为了验证这一假设，我们分析了来自三个不同实验室的三个不同队列的雄性大鼠的性行为。结果表明，在所有分析的队列中，射精后间隔和平均超时持续时间密切相关。此外，我们表明，个体超时持续时间至少部分是通过前一次安装回合中交配组件的感觉刺激总和来预测的，更多的阴茎刺激与更长的超时相关。这些发现表明超时和射精后间隔持续时间可能由抑制交配的感觉刺激的大小决定。是否在超时和射精后间隔的中央协调中涉及相同的神经通路应该受到未来的研究。