Development of habituation to novel environments in the rat.

Feigley, David A.; Parsons, Patricia J.; Hamilton, Leonard W.; Spear, Norman E.

doi:10.1037/h0032842

Cited by 79 publications

(51 citation statements)

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“…The unsystematic pattern of goal-arm selections among 15-day-olds suggests that ontongenetic variation in the utilization of stimuli may underlie developmental shifts in spontaneous alternation, Altman, Brunner, and Bayer (1973) have suggested that the 2-or 3-week-old domestic rat is behaviorally similar to the hippocampectornized adult of the species. Further, maturation rates of cells at the dentate gyrus and the development of cholinergic control over behavior are consistent with this brain-development hypothesis (Campbell, Lytle, & Fibiger, 1969;Douglas, 1972).This particular behavioral syndrome, typical of the young rat, includes: (a) elevated and persistent motor activity (Bronstein, Neiman, Wolkoff, & Levine, 1974;Campbell et al, 1969;Feigley, Parsons, Hamilton, & Spear, 1972), (b) considerable difficulty in the acquisition of a passive-avoidance task to a footshock US (e.g., Ricco & Marazzo, 1972), (c) impaired position-habit reversal (Harley & Moody, 1973), and (d) low levels of spontaneous alternation (Douglas, Peterson, & Douglas, 1973;Kirkby, 1967). The present paper describes attempts to replicate and to further understand the age-related differences in spontaneous alternation.…”

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confidence: 55%

“…This particular behavioral syndrome, typical of the young rat, includes: (a) elevated and persistent motor activity (Bronstein, Neiman, Wolkoff, & Levine, 1974;Campbell et al, 1969;Feigley, Parsons, Hamilton, & Spear, 1972), (b) considerable difficulty in the acquisition of a passive-avoidance task to a footshock US (e.g., Ricco & Marazzo, 1972), (c) impaired position-habit reversal (Harley & Moody, 1973), and (d) low levels of spontaneous alternation (Douglas, Peterson, & Douglas, 1973;Kirkby, 1967). The present paper describes attempts to replicate and to further understand the age-related differences in spontaneous alternation.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Age-related differences in rats’ spontaneous alternation

Bronstein

Dworkin

Bilder

1974

Animal Learning & Behavior

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Fifteen-day-old rats made random choices in a T-maze, while adult levels of alternation (approximately 70%) were noted among 30-day-olds, Also, younger pups were insensitive to a lengthening of the intertrial interval, unlike older animals whose rate of alternation decreased when a l-h delay was interposed between arm entries, These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that hippocampal development is a factor in the ontogeny of postweaning locomotion. The unsystematic pattern of goal-arm selections among 15-day-olds suggests that ontongenetic variation in the utilization of stimuli may underlie developmental shifts in spontaneous alternation, Altman, Brunner, and Bayer (1973) have suggested that the 2-or 3-week-old domestic rat is behaviorally similar to the hippocampectornized adult of the species. Further, maturation rates of cells at the dentate gyrus and the development of cholinergic control over behavior are consistent with this brain-development hypothesis (Campbell, Lytle, & Fibiger, 1969;Douglas, 1972).This particular behavioral syndrome, typical of the young rat, includes: (a) elevated and persistent motor activity (Bronstein, Neiman, Wolkoff, & Levine, 1974;Campbell et al, 1969;Feigley, Parsons, Hamilton, & Spear, 1972), (b) considerable difficulty in the acquisition of a passive-avoidance task to a footshock US (e.g., Ricco & Marazzo, 1972), (c) impaired position-habit reversal (Harley & Moody, 1973), and (d) low levels of spontaneous alternation (Douglas, Peterson, & Douglas, 1973;Kirkby, 1967). The present paper describes attempts to replicate and to further understand the age-related differences in spontaneous alternation. EXPERIMENT IThe first experiment is a longitudinal investigation of alternation in the rat. MethodSubjects. Twenty-three male and 14 female rat pups served as Ss. These were derived from four Sprague-Dawley albino litters (9 or 10 pups/dam) born in the Brooklyn College laboratories. The animals were individually marked and housed with their mothers in plastic litter cages. Twenty-two days after parturition, the maternal females were removed from their offspring with all pups left behind in the litter boxes. When the young were 31 days old, they were rehoused, 2 to a cage (same-sex pairs), except for a few individually caged Ss, Purina Lab Chow and water were always available, and the colony was heated to about 74°F. The vivarium was brightly lighted from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily, and Ss were run during the light part of the cycle, always at about the same time of day.Apparatus. One bottomless plywood T-rnaze, painted flat black, was the apparatus. The maze was 6.40 cm high and initially had a width of 6.35 em, but was widened to 10.80 cm throughout after the Ss were 31 days old. This enlargement was needed in order to accommodate the pups' growth. The apparatus was covered with clear Plexiglas, and three guillotine doors of white plastic divided the maze stem into a startbox and runway (each 20.32 cm long) and goal arms (each 28.85 em long). A 15-Wincandescent bulb, shaded ...

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confidence: 55%

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confidence: 99%

Age-related differences in rats’ spontaneous alternation

Bronstein

Dworkin

Bilder

1974

Animal Learning & Behavior

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“…Unfortunately, these two explanations are confounded in the current studies, nor were Feigley et al (1972) able to dispel this fatigue-based interpretation convincingly. In these latter experiments, light-contingent nose poking was recorded and, just as in the current work, IS-day-old rats were unique in their maintenance of high levels of responding without the activity decrements typical of older animals.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…From developmental investigations of T-maze alternation (Douglas, Peterson, & Douglas, I973Y, nose-poking behavior (Feigley, Parsons, Hamilton, & Spear, 1972), reactions to drugs affecting central cholinergic pathways (Campbell et al, 1969), passive-avoidance acquisition (Riccio & Schulenburg, 1969;Schulenburg, Riccio, & Stikes, 1971), and now open-field adaptation, it becomes clear that IS-day-old rats are very different from conspecifics as little as 6 days older. Also, the behavior on each of these criterion tasks shows the younger Ss to differ in a manner that is completely consistent with their being considered identical to adults (e.g., 1OO-day-olds) with bilateral hippocampal lesions and, therefore, lacking a system of response inhibition, perhaps.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of habituation in the rat

Bronstein

Neiman

Wolkoff

et al. 1974

Animal Learning & Behavior

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In each of two studies, rats of different ages were given one prolonged open-field trial. Animals of 21 days and older displayed within-session activity decrements, while 15-day-olds failed to habituate. The abrupt transition from a pattern-of nonhabituation to one of habituation to a novel environment parallels the development of forebrain cholinergic mechanisms during the third and fourth postnatal weeks. These experiments conform to the suggestion that the 2-week-old rat is behaviorally similar to the hippocampectomized adult.In none of the studies of the ontogeny of rats' open-field behaviors originating in this laboratory (Bronstein, 1972) has there been any clear difference in habituation rates among the various age groups. The level of locomotor activity (e.g., square crossing) has always appeared as a decreasing function of apparatus exposure on any given day. The greatest activity decrement appears between the first and second minutes of a 5-min trial; however, such declining rates of ambulation have appeared rather uniformly among animals varying in age from 30 to 175 days.That younger rats habituate at a rate similar to that of the adults is an unexpected finding in the light of the many reports of very persistent play and exploratory behaviors among immature animals in a variety of settings (cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1970). Martinek and Lat (1968), for example, have shown that many behavior patterns of canines are slower to habituate in pups than in adults. And in an excellent review, Harper (1970) discusses some of the unique social and ecological pressures on young mammals that might have selected for persistently active and gregarious juveniles.One suggestion to account for the relatively undifferentiated rates of open-field habituation in the rat during the second through fourth months of life is that the youngest Ss may already be old enough to show the pattern of habituation typical of adults. Campbell, Lytle, and Fibiger (1969) and Douglas (1972) have speculated that the rapid development of the rat's hippocampus during the third and fourth postnatal weeks represents the onset of a mechanism, the integrity of which is essential for behavioral adjustments (habituation, extinction) to biologically insignificant stimuli (Carlton, 1963(Carlton, , 1969.The two studies presented here are tests of the hypothesis that 2-week-old rats display unusually persistent locomotor activity and are behaviorally much *This research was supported by Grant 1442 from the Research Foundation of the City University of New York and by Grant MH22027-o1 from the National Institute of Mental Health. We wish to thank Joseph Gavlick and David Small for their technical assistance during the preparation of this paper.tRequests for reprints should be addressed to Paul M. Bronstein, Department of Psychology, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, New York 11210.like adults with bilateral hippocampal lesions in their failure to show an activity decrement with increased exposure to a new locale (Roberts, Dember, & Brodwick, 1962). Also, the t...

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“…Conditioning scores thus represent the entire cocaine-conditioning session and the first quarter of the pupconditioning session. During the remainder of the pup-conditioning session, dams were typically nursing or crouching over their pups; scores did not change after the first 30 min (see Feigley et al 1972;Roth and Katz 1979).…”

Section: Analyses and Statisticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Increasing the incentive salience of cocaine challenges preference for pup- over cocaine-associated stimuli during early postpartum: place preference and locomotor analyses in the lactating female rat

Seip

Morrell

2007

Psychopharmacology

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Rationale/Objectives-Prior studies using a dual-choice conditioned place preference (CPP) procedure revealed that postpartum female rats (dams) strongly prefer chambers associated with pups over those associated with subcutaneously administered cocaine almost exclusively during early but not late postpartum (Mattson et al. 2001). The present study examines whether early postpartum dams retain strong pup-associated chamber preference when contrasted with a cocaine stimulus of greater incentive salience (intraperitoneal [IP] injections with brief conditioning sessions). Locomotor rate was measured during conditioning (stimuli-present) and test (stimulus-absent) sessions.Materials and methods-A three-chambered CPP apparatus was used to compare preferences for chambers associated with IP cocaine vs age-matched pups. Unconditioned stimuli were systematically assigned to the least-preferred chamber of separate groups of dams before conditioning. Control dams verified that unconditioned stimuli were necessary for CPP and stimulusassociated locomotion.Results-Compared with most late postpartum dams (60%), only 31% of early postpartum dams preferred the cocaine-associated chamber (P<0.05). Substantially more dams preferred the pupassociated chamber during early postpartum (27%) than late postpartum (5%; P<0.05). Locomotor sensitization emerged across cocaine-conditioning sessions in cocaine-preferring but not puppreferring dams (P<0.05). Locomotor rates were consistently lower in preferred vs nonpreferred chambers during test.Conclusions-After increasing cocaine's incentive salience, more early postpartum dams prefer the cocaine-associated chamber than previously reported (Mattson et al. 2001). However, pupassociated chamber preference was still higher in early vs late postpartum. Pup-and cocainepreferring dams expressed differences in the induction phase of locomotor sensitization across cocaine conditioning but expressed similar motoric patterns in their preferred chambers at test.

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Development of habituation to novel environments in the rat.

Cited by 79 publications

References 5 publications

Age-related differences in rats’ spontaneous alternation

Age-related differences in rats’ spontaneous alternation

The development of habituation in the rat

Increasing the incentive salience of cocaine challenges preference for pup- over cocaine-associated stimuli during early postpartum: place preference and locomotor analyses in the lactating female rat

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