Pan S, Borowski T, de Lacalle S (2003) Sleep deprivation impairs retention performance on an olfactory discrimination task. Neuroscience 2003 Abstracts 616.21. Society for Neuroscience, New Orleans, LA.
Summary: Sleep deprivation is known to adversely affect learning and memory. We examined the effects of sleep deprivation on attentional and memory processes in rats that received unilateral cholinergic lesions with 192IgG-saporin. Young Fisher 344 male rats were evaluated on an olfactory discrimination learning task both before and after exposure to 8 hours of sleep deprivation. Prior to testing, rats were trained to associate a particular scent with a food reward. They were then tested on their ability to successfully distinguish between two randomly placed, differently scented cups to retrieve the food reward. On a second experiment we investigated the effect that chronic estrogen administration may exert on the cognitive response to sleep deprivation. Gonadectomized rats were implanted s.c. with a pellet containing estrogen or placebo, and tested before and after sleep deprivation, one month after treatment. Untreated rats displayed impaired performance on the retention of the olfactory discrimination task; sleep deprivation resulted in an inability to remember the association of the baited scent from the previous day of testing. However, hormonal treatment appeared to have no significant effect on olfactory discrimination performance. These findings suggest a beneficial effect of sleep in learning and memory. Further research is needed to unravel the role of steroid hormones in modulating sleep-deprived learning deficits in rodents.
Related Products: 192-IgG-SAP (Cat. #IT-01)