Intracranial self-stimulation also facilitates learning in a visual discrimination task in the Morris water maze in rats

Intracranial self-Stimulation (ICSS) of the medial forebrain bundle is a treatment capable of consistently facilitating acquisition of learning and memory in a wide array of experimental paradigms in rats. However, the evidence supporting this effect on implicit memory comes mainly from classical co...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: García-Brito, Soleil|||0000-0002-4292-3212, Morgado-Bernal, Ignacio|||0000-0002-6008-7449, Biosca Simón, Neus, Segura Torres, Pilar|||0000-0001-6963-8625
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2017
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:169418
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/169418
https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2016.09.069
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Deep brain stimulation
Intracranial self-stimulation
Medial forebrain bundle
Memory enhancement
Morris water maze
Simultaneous visual discrimination
Descripción
Sumario:Intracranial self-Stimulation (ICSS) of the medial forebrain bundle is a treatment capable of consistently facilitating acquisition of learning and memory in a wide array of experimental paradigms in rats. However, the evidence supporting this effect on implicit memory comes mainly from classical conditioning and avoidance tasks. The present work aims to determine whether ICSS would also improve the performance of rats in another type of implicit task such as cued simultaneous visual discrimination in the Morris Water Maze. The ICSS treatment was administered immediately after each of the five acquisition sessions and its effects on retention and reversal were evaluated 72h later. Results showed that ICSS subjects committed fewer errors than Sham subjects and adopted more accurate trajectories during the acquisition of the task. This improvement was maintained until the probe test at 72h. However, ICSS animals experienced more difficulties than the Sham group during the reversal of the same learning, reflecting an impairment in cognitive flexibility. We conclude that post-training ICSS could also be an effective treatment for improving implicit visual discrimination learning and memory.