Elsevier

Behavioural Brain Research

Volume 61, Issue 2, 18 April 1994, Pages 169-173
Behavioural Brain Research

Research report
Environmental enrichment reverses the detrimental action of early inconsistent stimulation and increases the beneficial effects of postnatal handling on shuttlebox learning in adult rats

https://doi.org/10.1016/0166-4328(94)90157-0Get rights and content

Abstract

Certain types of environmental stimulation administered during critical periods of neural development can enduringly modify adult behavior. The present experiments show that postnatal handling of Sprague-Dawley rats (administered from postnatal days 1 to 22) and/or living in an enriched environment (EE; from weaning until the age of 100 days) clearly improved the ability to learn a two-way active avoidance task in adulthood. In addition the results demonstrated that postnatal inconsistent stimulation (from postnatal days 1 to 22) impaired avoidance acquisition in the same task. This detrimental effect of inconsistent stimulation was reversed by EE. Our findings provide evidence that different types of early experience can influence learning abilities in distinct directions and with different strenghts.

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      Later studies have replicated these findings and, importantly, they have also established that one of the most evident consequences of such a mild infantile stimulation treatment is that it leads to enduring anti-stress and anxiety-reducing effects in many different tests or conditions (e.g., Escorihuela et al., 1991, 1992, 1994, 1995; Núñez et al., 1995, 1996; Ferré et al., 1995; Levine et al., 1967; Meaney et al., 1988; Fernández-Teruel et al., 1992, 1997, 2002b; Raineki et al., 2014; Rio-Alamos et al., 2015, 2017). Thus, taking also into account that NH-induced improvements on two-way avoidance are observed during the initial acquisition stages (i.e. when the approach-avoidance conflict is more intense), the most likely hypothesis is that NH improves acquisition of the task because of its long-term anxiety-reducing effects (e.g. Escorihuela et al., 1994, 1995; Nuñez et al., 1995; Rio-Alamos et al., 2015, 2017). This contention is further supported by the fact that unconditioned locomotor activity (measured as crossings during the 5-10 min period of familiarization with the shuttle box prior to the start of the training session) was not increased in any of those studies.

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