Rewarded associative and instrumental conditioning after neonatal ventral hippocampus lesions in rats.

Full Abstract

Sprague Dawley rats were submitted to bilateral ventral hippocampus lesions 7 days after birth. This corresponds to the Lipska and Weinberger's procedure for modeling schizophrenia. The aim of the present work was to test the learning capacity of such rats with an associative Pavlovian and an instrumental learning paradigm, both methods using reward outcome (food, sucrose or polycose). The associative paradigm comprised also a second learning test with reversed learning contingencies. The instrumental conditioning comprised an extinction test under outcome devaluation conditions. Neonatally lesioned rats, once adults (over 60 days of age), showed a conditioning deficit in the associative paradigm but not in the instrumental one. Lesioned rats remained able to adapt as readily as controls to the reversed learning contingency and were as sensitive as controls to the devaluation of outcome. Such observations indicate that the active access (instrumental learning) to a reward could have compensated for the deficit observed under the "passive" stimulus-reward associative learning condition. This feature is compared to the memory management impairments observed in clinical patients.

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Author information

Author/s: Macedo, Carlos Eduardo (CE); Sandner, Guy (G); Angst, Marie-Josée (MJ); Guiberteau, Thierry (T);

Affiliation: U666 INSERM, Faculté de Médecine, Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Brain research (Brain Res), published in Netherlands. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2008-Jun; vol 1215 (issue ) : pp 190-9

Dates: Created 2008/06/06; Completed 2008/09/04;

PMID: 18482713, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Age Factors
Analysis of Variance
Animals
Association Learning - physiology
Conditioning, Classical - physiology
Extinction, Psychological - physiology

Hippocampus - physiology
Male
Rats
Rats, Sprague-Dawley
Reinforcement (Psychology)
Reversal Learning - physiology

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