Elsevier

Behavioural Brain Research

Volume 175, Issue 1, 25 November 2006, Pages 112-118
Behavioural Brain Research

Research report
NMDA antagonist MK-801 impairs acquisition of place strategies, but not their use

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2006.08.011Get rights and content

Abstract

Evidence that NMDA receptors contribute to synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus has stimulated research on their role in behavioral learning and memory. Recent studies indicate that NMDA antagonists decrease use of place strategies by rats in a T-maze task that can be solved using either a “place” or “response” strategy. In the present study, rats were given MK-801 before maze exposure and/or training on this redundant strategy T-maze task. MK-801 did not impair rats’ ability to learn the task, but did change the strategies they used on a probe trial administered after learning. MK-801 decreased use of place strategies only when administered before both maze exposure and training; rats given MK-801 only before maze exposure or only before training tended to use place strategies on the probe trial. These results show that MK-801 does not prevent rats from utilizing previously acquired spatial information, but does appear to impair the acquisition of spatial information needed for place strategies.

Section snippets

Method

The research described herein was conducted under protocols that were reviewed and approved by the Radford University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

Results

Data from rats receiving MK-801 in the first two replications of the study were discarded because of an error in the drug administration protocol, resulting in the loss of two rats from each of the drug–drug, vehicle–drug, and drug–vehicle conditions. Data from the rats run in the vehicle–vehicle condition in the first two replications were included in the final set of data, as inclusion or exclusion of the data from these rats did not alter the pattern of results obtained in the study.

A total

Discussion

The results of the present study show that treatment with MK-801 does not impair acquisition of a T-maze learning task, but does affect how the task is solved. Here, rats were trained on an appetitive T-maze position discrimination that could be solved using place or response strategies. The task was rapidly acquired by most rats, and there were no apparent differences between rats given MK-801 and those given vehicle injections in how long they took to reach criterion performance.

Acknowledgements

This research was done in partial fulfillment of a M.A. at Radford University. The authors would like to thank Pamela Jackson and Thomas Pierce of Radford University, and Donald K. Ingram and Peter R. Mouton of the Laboratory of Experimental Gerontology at the National Institute on Aging for their help in the editing and preparation of this manuscript.

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