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Adolescent and adult rats differ in the amnesic effects of acute ethanol in two hippocampus-dependent tasks: Trace and contextual fear conditioning
- Source :
- Behavioural brain research. 298
- Publication Year :
- 2015
-
Abstract
- Experience-produced deficits in trace conditioning and context conditioning have been useful tools for examining the role of the hippocampus in learning. It has also been suggested that learning in these tasks is especially vulnerable to neurotoxic effects of alcohol during key developmental periods such as adolescence. In five experiments we systematically examined the presence and source of age-dependent vulnerability to the memory-disrupting effects of acute ethanol in trace conditioning and contextual fear conditioning. In Experiment 1a pre-training ethanol disrupted trace conditioning more strongly in adolescent (postnatal day, PD30-35) than adult rats (PD65-75). In Experiment 1b when pre-training ethanol was accompanied by pre-test ethanol no deficit in trace conditioning was observed in adolescents, suggesting that state-dependent retrieval failure mediated ethanol's disruption of trace conditioning at this age. Experiments 2a and 2b examined the effect of ethanol pretreatment on context conditioning. Here, adult but not adolescent rats were impaired in conditioned freezing to context cues. Experiment 2c explored state-dependency of this effect. Pre-training ethanol continued to disrupt context conditioning in adults even when ethanol was also administered prior to test. Collectively these findings reveal clear age-dependent and task-dependent vulnerabilities in ethanol's disruptive effects on hippocampus-dependent memory. Adolescents were more disrupted by ethanol in trace conditioning than adults, and adults were more disrupted by ethanol in context conditioning than adolescents. We suggest that adolescents may be more susceptible to changes in internal state (state-dependent retrieval failure) than adults and that ethanol disrupted performance in trace and context conditioning through different mechanisms. Relevance of these findings to theories of hippocampus function is discussed.
- Subjects :
- Male
Aging
Hippocampus
Amnesia
Context (language use)
Alcohol
Neuropsychological Tests
Article
Developmental psychology
Rats, Sprague-Dawley
03 medical and health sciences
Behavioral Neuroscience
chemistry.chemical_compound
Random Allocation
0302 clinical medicine
Memory
Conditioning, Psychological
medicine
Animals
Fear conditioning
Freezing Reaction, Cataleptic
Conditioning (Psychology)
Psychotropic Drugs
Sex Characteristics
Dose-Response Relationship, Drug
Ethanol
Fear
030227 psychiatry
chemistry
Conditioning
Female
medicine.symptom
Psychology
Neuroscience
030217 neurology & neurosurgery
Sex characteristics
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 18727549
- Volume :
- 298
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Behavioural brain research
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....2a76fe470162116d73bf682376fda9f0