Chronic cocaine causes age-dependent increases in risky choice in both males and females.
Individuals who use cocaine exhibit maladaptive decision-making, overweighting rewards, and underweighting potential risks. We previously showed that chronic cocaine self-administration in young adult male rats causes long-lasting increases in risk taking. The present study expanded upon these findings to determine whether effects of cocaine on risk taking depend on the route of cocaine administration and extend to females. To address the former question, rats in Experiment 1 were trained on the Risky Decision-making Task (RDT), received passively administered cocaine, and were retested in the RDT. Surprisingly, passive co...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 17, 2022 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Sex and estrous cycle in memory for sequences of events in rats.
Behavioral Neuroscience, Vol 136(5), Oct 2022, 349-363; doi:10.1037/bne0000508The ability to remember sequences of events is fundamental to episodic memory. While rodent studies have examined sex and estrous cycle in episodic-like spatial memory tasks, little is known about these biological variables in memory for sequences of events that depend on representations of temporal context. We investigated the role of sex and estrous cycle in rats during training and testing stages of a cross-species validated sequence memory task (Jayachandran et al., 2019). Rats were trained on a two four-odor sequence memory task delivered on...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 7, 2022 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Sex and estrous cycle in memory for sequences of events in rats.
The ability to remember sequences of events is fundamental to episodic memory. While rodent studies have examined sex and estrous cycle in episodic-like spatial memory tasks, little is known about these biological variables in memory for sequences of events that depend on representations of temporal context. We investigated the role of sex and estrous cycle in rats during training and testing stages of a cross-species validated sequence memory task (Jayachandran et al., 2019). Rats were trained on a two four-odor sequence memory task delivered on opposite ends of a linear track. Training occurred in six successive stages s...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 7, 2022 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Odor mixture perception during flavor consumption in rats.
Odor mixtures can be perceived as configural (i.e., different from their components) or elemental (i.e., similar to their components). Previous work demonstrates that these perceptual modes are determined by both peripheral and central interactions among mixture components. Flavor consumption is associated with unique peripheral and central odor processing mechanisms, but how this context affects perception of odor mixtures remains unknown. Here, we used a flavor consumption task in rats to measure preferences for solutions of binary odor mixtures and their components. In contrast to previous findings using identical mixtu...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - March 7, 2022 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Surprise-induced enhancements in the associability of Pavlovian cues facilitate learning across behavior systems.
Surprising violations of outcome expectancies have long been known to enhance the associability of Pavlovian cues; that is, the rate at which the cue enters into further associations. The adaptive value of such enhancements resides in promoting new learning in the face of uncertainty. However, it is unclear whether associability enhancements reflect increased associative plasticity within a particular behavior system, or whether they can facilitate learning between a cue and any arbitrary outcome, as suggested by attentional models of conditioning. Here, we show evidence consistent with the latter hypothesis. Violating the...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - February 17, 2022 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Cortical taste processing evolves through benign taste exposures.
Experience impacts learning and perception. Familiarity with stimuli that later become the conditioned stimulus (CS) in a learning paradigm, for instance, reduces the strength of that learning—a fact well documented in studies of conditioned taste aversion (CTA; De la Casa & Lubow, 1995; Lubow, 1973; Lubow & Moore, 1959). Recently, we have demonstrated that even experience with “incidental” (i.e., non-CS) stimuli influences CTA learning: Long Evans rats pre-exposed to salty and/or sour tastes later learn unusually strong aversions to novel sucrose (Flores et al., 2016), and exhibit enhanced sucrose-responsiveness aft...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - January 20, 2022 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Adolescent female rats undergo full systems consolidation of an aversive memory, while males of the same age fail to discriminate contexts.
Generalization is an adaptive process that allows animals to deal with threatening circumstances similar to prior experiences. Systems consolidation is a time-dependent process in which memory loses it precision concomitantly with reorganizational changes in the brain structures that support memory retrieval. In this, memory becomes progressively independent from the hippocampus and more reliant on cortical structures. Generalization, however, may take place much faster in adult animals depending on the presence of sex hormones. Notwithstanding its relevance, there are few studies on sex differences in memory modulation. H...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - January 13, 2022 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Macaques fail to develop habit responses during extended training on a reinforcer devaluation task.
Goal-directed behavior and habit are parallel and, at times, competing processes. The relative balance of flexible, goal-directed responding as compared to inflexible habitual responding is highly dependent on experience (e.g., training history in a task) and conditions under which the behavior was formed. Reinforcer devaluation tasks have been used widely across species to study the neurobiology of goal-directed behavior. In rodents, under some conditions, extended training in reinforcer devaluation tasks transforms goal-directed responses into habits, rendering the animals insensitive to devaluation. In nonhuman primates...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - January 13, 2022 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Curcumin alleviates restraint stress-induced learning and memory deficit and activity via modulation of biochemical, morphology changes, and apoptosis in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.
Restraint stress indicated induction of morphology, biochemistry, and behavioral impairments. Several investigations have reported that curcumin has a protective effect against stress disturbance. The present study is designed to investigate the effects of curcumin on learning and memory, activity, biochemical, morphology changes, and apoptosis in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex of restraint stress rats. For chronic restraint stress, the rats were kept in the restrainers for 2.5 h per day for 21 consecutive days. The animals received the gavage of curcumin every other day for 21 days. After stress, the animals were s...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - January 13, 2022 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
The effect of chronic pain on voluntary and involuntary capture of attention: An event-related potential study.
This study aimed to investigate the influence of chronic pain on involuntary as well as voluntary allocation of attention as, respectively, indexed by the P3a and P3b components in the event-related potential derived from the electroencephalogram. Both involuntary and voluntary captures of attention were compared between 33 patients with chronic pain and 33 healthy controls using an auditory three-stimulus oddball task (with standard, target, and unexpected distractor tones). The results revealed a reduced P3a amplitude as well as a reduced P3b amplitude in patients with chronic pain compared to healthy controls, indicatin...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - December 23, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Agmatine improves olfactory and cognitive deficits in Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats (SHR): An animal model of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
This study provides the first evidence that agmatine improves olfactory and cognitive impairments observed in an animal model of ADHD. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Behavioral Neuroscience)
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - December 16, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
The anatomy and function of the postrhinal cortex.
The parahippocampal cortex (PHC) in the primate brain is implicated in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) memory network for spatial and episodic memory, but the precise function of this region remains unclear. Importantly, the rodent postrhinal cortex (POR) provides a structural and connectional homolog to the primate PHC. This homology permits the use of the powerful tools available in rodent models to better understand the function of the PHC in the human and nonhuman primate brains. Although many articles have compared and dissociated the function of the rodent POR from other areas in the MTL implicated in learning, memory...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - December 16, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Contributions of the retrosplenial and posterior parietal cortices to cue-specific and contextual fear conditioning.
The retrosplenial cortex (RSP) and the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) are the primary sources of cortical sensory input to the postrhinal cortex (POR) in rodents. Together, these areas compose a major corticohippocampal circuit that is involved in processing visuospatial information. The POR has been implicated in contextual learning and memory, consistent with the type of information presumably being processed by this region. By comparison, little is known about the role of the RSP or the PPC in contextual learning. In the present study, rats were trained either before or after surgery in a standard signaled fear conditi...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - December 6, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Forgiveness weakens counterempathy at the early and late stage of empathic responses to opponents’ expressions.
Our emotional response to people is discordant with their emotional experience in competitive situations; this phenomenon is termed “counterempathy.” Using event-related potentials, this study investigated the neural underpinnings of the effect of forgiveness on counterempathy. Twenty-seven female university students participated in a two phase-interpersonal competitive game with two other players whose smiles and frowns indicated the participant’s losing and winning, respectively. In the “passive” phase, participants were passively punished with a high- or low-intensity noise chosen by the opponent each time the...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - November 22, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
Curcumin improves reversal learning in middle-aged rhesus monkeys.
Age-related impairments in cognitive function occur in multiple animal species including humans and nonhuman primates. Humans and rhesus monkeys exhibit a similar pattern of cognitive decline beginning in middle age, particularly within the domain of executive function. The prefrontal cortex is the brain region most closely associated with mediating executive function. Previous studies in rhesus monkeys have demonstrated that normal aging leads to an increase in myelin degradation in the prefrontal regions that correlates with cognitive decline. This myelin deterioration is thought to result, at least in part, from the age...
Source: Behavioral Neuroscience - November 15, 2021 Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research
