Assessment of Impulsivity in Adolescent Mice: A New Training Procedure for a 3-Choice Serial Reaction Time Task.

Assessment of Impulsivity in Adolescent Mice: A New Training Procedure for a 3-Choice Serial Reaction Time Task. Behav Brain Res. 2018 Jan 17;: Authors: Sasamori H, Ohmura Y, Kubo T, Yoshida T, Yoshioka M Abstract Immaturity in impulse control among adolescents could result in substance abuse, criminal involvement, and suicide. The brains of adolescents and adults are anatomically, neurophysiologically, and pharmacologically different. Therefore, preclinical models of adolescent impulsivity are required to screen drugs for adolescents and elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying age-related differences in impulsivity. The conventional 3- or 5-choice serial reaction time task, which is a widely used task to assess impulsivity in adult rodents, cannot be used for young mice because of two technical problems: impaired growth caused by food restriction and the very long training duration. To overcome these problems, we altered the conventional training process, optimizing the degree of food restriction for young animals and shortening the training duration. We found that almost all basal performance levels were similar between the novel and conventional procedures. We also confirmed the pharmacological validity of our results: the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2C (5-HT2C) receptor agonist Ro60-0175 (0.6 mg/kg, subcutaneous) reduced the occurrence of premature responses, whereas the 5-HT2C receptor antagonist SB242084 (0.5 mg/kg intraperitoneal) ...
Source: Behavioural Brain Research - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Behav Brain Res Source Type: research