LEARNING MEMORY

Learning Memory: Scoring behaviour of freely moving rats during exposure to environmental novelty and familiarity

Learning Memory: Scoring behaviour of freely moving rats during exposure to environmental novelty and familiarity

Introduction

Early life experience affects behavior and brain mechanisms. Handling rats throughout the first three weeks in life can slow age-related cognitive decline (as assessed by a hippocampal-dependent spatial learning task) and decrease age-related hippocampal neuron loss. It is not clear, although, if this early environmental leverage on learning is selective for old age or is more general, affecting cognitive development throughout infancy and juvenile adulthood as well. We succinctly revealed neonatal rats to a innovative non-home environment for 3 min every day throughout the first three weeks of life (as a constituent of the management method). We discovered that this short early environmental manipulation produced in increased hippocampal-dependent learning immediately after weaning and that this learning enhancement persisted into adulthood. These outcomes suggest that subtle early life happenings can affect cognitive development in all developmental stages and that alterations in neural mechanisms other than neuron number are probable to mediate the learning enhancement at multiple developmental stages (Denenberg, 2002).

Discussion

Early life environment is significant for the development of cognitive functions and their inherent neural mechanisms. Neonatal handling, one specific early environmental manipulation, has been shown to enhance learning presentation along with other alterations in development and development, emotional reactivity, and tension responses. The handling procedure as a entails for enquiring early environmental leverage was revised extensively 30-40 years before and obtained critical inspection with consider to how robust the handling consequences are and how viable it is to ascribe exact facets of this behavioral manipulation to exact alterations in behavior. In the late 1970s, it became clear that the hippocampus performances a critical function in learning and memory, and the Morris water task was established as the gold benchmark for assessing hippocampal-dependent learning. Early environmental manipulation through the handling method was discovered to lead to retardation of cognitive aging as assessed by presentation on this hippocampal-dependent task and to origin alterations in neural circuitry inside the hippocampus, for example decreased neuronal loss throughout aging. It has been suggested that this early environmental modulation of cognitive aging may be mediated by avoidance of age-related neuronal loss.

We present two series of studies with dual purposes. The primary goal of these experiments was to investigate if early environmental manipulation can lead to enhancement in hippocampal-dependent learning throughout early development and juvenile adulthood, long before aging. The lesser aim was to advance the handling conceive by reducing the number of factors engaged in the handling method step by step to better relate one particular factor to subsequent changes in learning. Combining a neonatal novelty-exposure procedure with a moving-platform version of the water task (aversive and spatial learning) and a two-odor-discrimination task (appetitive and nonspatial learning), we found that early environmental manipulations, as subtle as a brief 3-min every day exposure to a novel environment, can enhance hippocampal-dependent memory ...