Behavioral Flexibility in alcohol drinking monkeys: the morning after

Details

• Alternative Title:
  Alcohol Clin Exp Res
• Personal Author:
  Shnitko, Tatiana A ; Gonzales, Steven W. ; Newman, Natali ; Grant, Kathleen A.
• 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:
  Article
• Source:
  Alcohol Clin Exp Res. 44(3):729-737
• Pubmed ID:
  31984521
• Pubmed Central ID:
  PMC7236888
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Funding:
  U01 AA013510/AA/NIAAA NIH HHS/United States ; P51 OD011092/OD/NIH HHS/United States ; P51 OD011092/CD/ODCDC CDC HHS/United States ; R24 AA019431/AA/NIAAA NIH HHS/United States ; P60 AA010760/AA/NIAAA NIH HHS/United States
• Volume:
  44
• Issue:
  3
• Collection(s):
  CDC Public Access
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:bf91fa54dbe7b438c4c5477d55a9e1670af75fd28baf00dd63c3a714ee1dfe5a
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/88163/cdc_88163_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 526.24 KB ]