Wallace DG, Knapp SK, Silver JA, Martin MM, Winter SS (2007) Selective hippocampal cholinergic deafferentation disrupts exploratory trip organization. Neuroscience 2007 Abstracts 743.17/BBB11. Society for Neuroscience, San Diego, CA.
Summary: Rats organize their exploration of an environment around a central location or home base. Movements away from the home base are characterized as a series of slow progressions punctuated by stops. Subsequent to the last stop, the homeward segment is a single, rapid progression associated with a consistent temporal pacing of linear speeds. Observing these characteristics of exploratory behavior independent of environmental cue availability or familiarity has supported rats’ use of self-movement cues generated after departing the home base to estimate the distance and direction back to the home base. The current study investigated the effects of selective hippocampal cholinergic deafferentation on home base establishment and exploratory trip organization. Long Evans female rats either received injections of 192 IgG-Saporin (SAP) or saline (SHAM) into the medial septum. Subsequent to recovery, rats were placed on a large circular table with access to a refuge under complete dark conditions (infrared cameras and goggles were used to visualize the rat). Although all rats established a home base in the refuge, impairments in exploratory trip organization specific to the homeward segment were observed in SAP rats. Specifically, SAP rats displayed inconsistent temporal pacing of homeward segment linear speeds. These observations are consistent with a role for hippocampal cholinergic function in processing self-movement cues.
Related Products: 192-IgG-SAP (Cat. #IT-01)