Short communicationEndogenous anxiety and stress responses in water maze and Barnes maze spatial memory tasks
Section snippets
Anxiety and social dominance
None of the anxiety-related measures in the elevated-plus maze was significantly correlated with any of the anxiety-related measures in the light/dark test (r's < .272, p's > .146), suggesting that they represent independent aspects of the psychological construct “anxiety”. The score on the social dominance tube test was unrelated to any of the anxiety measures in either test (r's < .310, p's > .095).
Spatial learning
Mice improved significantly on both spatial learning tasks across the 5 days of testing. The water maze measures of search error, escape latency, and total path length all decreased, indicating good spatial learning [Fs4,36 > 11.7, p's < .001]. Similarly, total and primary errors decreased significantly in the Barnes maze [Fs4,36 > 14.915, p's < .001]. Escape latency and path length, which sometimes correlate with error measures in the Barnes maze, also decreased across training [Fs4,36 > 16.959, p's <
Anxiety and spatial learning
To evaluate the relationship between stress and learning, correlative analyses were conducted on data from water-maze and Barnes-maze groups. In the Barnes maze, the unitary measures of escape latency and path length were both correlated with percent closed-arm entries in the plus maze (r's > .685, p's < .03). In the water maze, path length was associated with percent time in dark in the light–dark test (r = .739, p = .015). None of the other pre-test anxiety measures was significantly correlated with
Corticosterone and spatial learning
Post-test corticosterone levels were used as an indicator of stress during cognitive testing. Corticosterone levels differed significantly among the groups [F2,27 = 73.264; p < .001; Fig. 1]. Naïve animals had significantly lower corticosterone levels than both groups of experimental mice (p's < .001). The water-maze test was the more stressful test as indicated by plasma corticosterone levels significantly higher than those of Barnes maze-tested mice (p < .001). The pre-test anxiety measures in the
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by a grant from the NIH (AG022439 to Mike McDonald). The Vanderbilt Hormone Assay & Analytical Services Core is supported by NIH grants DK20593 to the Diabetes Research Training Center (DRTC) and DK59637 to the Mouse Metabolic Phenotyping Center (MMPC).
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