Relationship of low doses of alcohol voluntarily consumed during adolescence and early adulthood with subsequent behavioral flexibility

Abstract

Previous alcohol use is associated with impaired decision-making and impulsivity in humans, but the relationship between alcohol use and decision-making/impulsivity is unclear. In two experiments, we determined whether chronic intermittent access to alcohol during adolescence and early adulthood would alter or be correlated with performance in a go/no-go reversal task, a devaluation task, or operant extinction. Rats received 6 weeks of chronic intermittent access to 20% alcohol or water from postnatal day 26 to 66 and then behavioral testing was initiated 1.5-2.5 weeks later. We found no evidence that voluntary alcohol consumption altered behavior in either task. However, we found that rats that consumed more alcohol made fewer commission errors in reversal learning compared with rats that drank less. There was no relationship between alcohol consumption and reversal learning omission errors. Alcohol consumption was not correlated with the magnitude of the devaluation effect, but rats that consumed more alcohol showed faster extinction during the devaluation test. Our results suggest that the relationships between behavioral flexibility and alcohol consumption may represent individual differences. Future work will determine the neurobiological and genetic bases of these behavioral differences.

Sex-dependent effects of chronic intermittent voluntary alcohol consumption on attentional, not motivational, measures during probabilistic learning and reversal

“…Therefore, we used a two-bottle choice procedure that allows for oral consumption of EtOH, resulting in increased ecological validity and variability in consumption patterns, which may be important in generating individual differences in alcohol consumption to study subsequent flexible reward learning. To our knowledge, there had only been one study that previously used this voluntary consumption model to test the effects of EtOH on reversal learning, and found no effect [6]. However, it is important to note that although the rats in that EtOH group had access to EtOH for 6 weeks, the rats in that study did not demonstrate escalation normally seen with intermittent voluntary EtOH consumption models, including our study.…”

“…We observed the most pronounced impairment following EtOH on sessions to reach criterion during pretraining; a pattern that was not maintained through discrimination or reversal learning. Prior studies testing the relationship between alcohol exposure and performance on reversal learning tasks have largely been mixed, with some studies demonstrating alcohol produced impairments in both discrimination and reversal learning [4,58], other showing no impairments for either [5,6,45,59,60], and some only showing impairments on reversal, with the discrimination learning phase largely intact [5,47,58,61,62]. These conflicting findings may be due to variations in alcohol administration procedures, most of which have used forced-…”

“…In deterministic (fully-predictive) reversal learning paradigms more frequently employed in behavioral pharmacology experiments, subjects first learn to discriminate and choose between two stimuli, one of which is rewarded and the other which is not. After successful discrimination, the associated outcomes of the two stimuli are reversed, forcing the subject to remap the associations [3][4][5][6]. In probabilistic reversal learning (PRL) paradigms, each stimulus is associated with a probability of reward (e.g.…”

“…Voluntary alcohol consumption models (e.g. 2-Bottle Choice, EtOH gelatin) have been used to assess effects on deterministic reversal learning [6,9,10], resulting in no significant treatment group differences. However, it is worth noting that these studies only examined overall performance (i.e.…”

Adolescent Alcohol Drinking Renders Adult Drinking BLA-Dependent: BLA Hyper-Activity as Contributor to Comorbid Alcohol Use Disorder and Anxiety Disorders

“…Alcohol and QuAD drinking are reported in grams (solution consumed)/kg (body weight) per 24 h (total time given access): g/kg/24 h. Because the alcohol solution was ~80% water, ethanol drinking levels were lower than alcohol drinking levels. Ethanol drinking (g/mL of 20% ethanol) was determined by multiplying alcohol drinking by a constant factor (0.162) [ 17 , 18 ]. Importantly, this transformation did not change the underlying distribution of drinking.…”