Elsevier

Physiology & Behavior

Volume 63, Issue 5, March 1998, Pages 903-909
Physiology & Behavior

Original Articles
Repeated Acquisition of a Spatial Navigation Task in Mice: Effects of Spacing of Trials and of Unilateral Middle Cerebral Artery Occlusion

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0031-9384(98)00003-1Get rights and content

Abstract

The working memory version of the Morris water escape task, the repeated acquisition task, consists of trial pairs in which an animal is started twice from the same start position. Animals have mastered this task when they need less time to find the platform in the second of the two trials. In this study, study, male C57BL mice were trained on this task with massed, spaced, or spaced delay trials in which there was a 90-min delay between the first and second trials of a pair. The mice trained with spaced trials learned the repeated acquisition task, whereas the mice trained with massed or spaced delay trials were not consistently able to do so. When the mice had reached a stable baseline performance, the middle cerebral artery (MCA) was occluded or the mice were sham-operated. Then, the effects of the MCA occlusion (MCA-O) on the performance in the repeated acquisition tasks were studied. MCA occlusion hardly affected the performance in this task, irrespective of the spacing condition of the trials, although surgery per se seemed to have a transient disruptive effect.

Section snippets

Animals

Fifty-five C57BL mice (C57BL/6JOlaHsd, Harlan UK Limited, Bicester, UK) weighing 20 ± 2 g were used. They were randomly assigned to six experimental groups (see Table 1 ). The animals were housed in groups of 10-in standard type III MakrolonTM cages. Prior to the experiment, the animals were allowed to adapt to our animal facilities for at least 1 week. They were kept under constant temperature (21°C) and humidity (50%) with an artificial 12-h light–dark cycle (on: 1900 hours), and had free

Histology

Small areas of infarcted tissue were obvious on the surface of the brains, the areas being smaller the longer after surgery they were examined. The damage induced by MCA-O, however, could not be quantified reliably, because infarct volumes decrease nonlinearly over the course of time [our unpublished data and [5]]. According to Chiamulera and coworkers [5], the decrease in infarct volume after MCA-O might be due to “phagocytic activity, which leads to a gradual elimination of necrotic material

Discussion

The standard water escape task in which an animal is required to find a submerged platform predominantly measures spatial reference memory [23]. The reference memory (RM) holds trial-independent information [3]concerning, for example, the position of the escape platform. Repeated acquisition procedures are designed to assess an additional memory component, namely, working memory 38, 43, 44.

Several authors have shown that rats are capable of mastering repeated acquisition tasks [e.g. 24, 38] in

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