Voluntary alcohol access during adolescence/early adulthood, but not during adulthood, causes faster omission contingency learning.

Voluntary alcohol access during adolescence/early adulthood, but not during adulthood, causes faster omission contingency learning. Behav Brain Res. 2019 May 13;:111918 Authors: Pickens CL, Kallenberger P, Pajser A, Fisher H Abstract In omission contingency training, rodents learn to suppress their natural tendency to approach or touch a reward-predictive cue (termed "autoshaping" or "sign-tracking" responses) if the approach/touching responses lead to the omission of the reward. Previous research has shown that high levels of alcohol exposure (through alcohol vapor exposure) or adolescent alcohol consumption (with some versions of the omission contingency task) can lead to faster omission contingency learning. However, the alcohol exposure procedures and/or omission contingency task parameters differed between these different demonstrations. It was unclear whether the same voluntary alcohol consumption procedures during adolescence/early adulthood and/or adulthood would lead to faster omission contingency learning in one or both age groups. Here, rats received 6 weeks of chronic intermittent access to 20% alcohol or water from PND 26-66 (adolescence/early adulthood in Exp. 1) or PND 68-108 (adulthood in Exp. 2) and began behavioral training (autoshaping training followed by omission contingency training) 10-17 days later. We found no evidence that alcohol access at either age altered the number of trials with a sign-tracking respons...
Source: Behavioural Brain Research - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Behav Brain Res Source Type: research