i
Behavioral Flexibility in alcohol drinking monkeys: the morning after
-
February 18 2020
Source: Alcohol Clin Exp Res. 44(3):729-737 -
Alternative Title:Alcohol Clin Exp Res
-
Personal Author:
-
Description:Background.
Heavy alcohol drinking has aspects of inflexible behavior. This study addressed the consequences of chronic alcohol drinking on cognitive and sensory-motor domains of behavioral flexibility in rhesus monkeys.
Methods.
Behavioral flexibility was assessed in 12 monkeys (n=9, ethanol drinkers) with a set-shifting visual discrimination procedure before alcohol self-administration and while maintaining consumption of 1.5g/kg/day ethanol. Task performance was assessed the morning after ~18 hours of drinking 1.5g/kg, and 1 hour before the next day’s drinking session began. The first 10 set-shifting sessions had the original (pre-ethanol) test parameters and were used to determine retention of pre-ethanol performance. Then an effect of sensory-motor challenge (60% reduction in the size of the discriminative stimuli) on performance was assessed during 10 additional sessions.
Results.
There were no average group-dependent differences in the performance between control and ethanol groups at the pre-ethanol time-point. The daily consumption of 1.5g/kg/day produced binge alcohol intakes in 7 out of 9 monkeys (BEC ≥ 80mg/dl). Chronic daily intakes of 1.5g/kg had no effect on retention of the task in the sober state. However, when challenged with a reduction in the size of the stimuli, daily 1.5g/kg ethanol resulted in a decrement in performance due to an increase in the number of errors.
Conclusions.
Rhesus monkeys consuming 1.5g/kg alcohol daily perform equally as well as control monkeys in retention of a well-learned cognitive task. However, this pattern of daily alcohol intake robustly decreased the ability to flexibly adjust behavior when confronted with novel changes to perceptual stimuli.
-
Subjects:
-
Pubmed ID:31984521
-
Pubmed Central ID:PMC7236888
-
Document Type:
-
Funding:
-
Collection(s):
-
Main Document Checksum:
-
Download URL:
-
File Type:
-
xml pdf pdf pdf gif jpeg gif jpeg gif jpeg gif jpeg
Details:
Supporting Files
More +