Comparison of the performance of DBA/2 and C57BL/6 mice in transitive inference and foreground and background contextual fear conditioning.
- 1 January 2012
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Behavioral Neuroscience
- Vol. 126 (2), 249-257
- https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027048
Abstract
DBA/2 mice have altered hippocampal structure and perform poorly in several hippocampus-dependent contextual/spatial learning tasks. The performance of this strain in higher cognitive tasks is less studied. Transitive inference is a hippocampus-dependent task that requires an abstraction to be made from prior rules to form a new decision matrix; performance of DBA/2 mice in this task is unknown, whereas contextual fear conditioning is a hippocampus-dependent task in which DBA/2 mice have deficits. The present study compared DBA/2J and C57BL/6J inbred mice in two different contextual fear conditioning paradigms and transitive inference to test whether similar deficits are seen across these hippocampus-dependent tasks. For background fear conditioning, mice were trained with two paired presentations of an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS, 30 seconds, 85 dB white noise) paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US, 2 seconds, 0.57 mA footshock), the context was a continuous background CS. Mice were tested for contextual learning 24 hours later. Foreground fear conditioning differed in that no auditory CS was presented. For transitive inference, separate mice were trained to acquire a series of overlapping odor discrimination problems and tested with novel odor pairings that either did or did not require the use of transitive inference. DBA/2 mice performed significantly worse than the C57BL/6 in both foreground and background fear conditioning and transitive inference. These results demonstrate that the DBA/2 mice have deficits in higher-cognitive processes and suggest that similar substrates may underlie deficits in contextual learning and transitive inference.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA024787)
- National Cancer Institute (CA143187)
This publication has 73 references indexed in Scilit:
- Differences in hippocampal CREB phosphorylation in trace fear conditioning of two inbred mouse strainsBrain Research, 2010
- Transitive Inference: Distinct Contributions of Rostrolateral Prefrontal Cortex and the HippocampusJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2010
- Prefrontal cortex: Role in acquisition of overlapping associations and transitive inferenceLearning & Memory, 2010
- The role of the hippocampus in transitive inferencePsychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 2009
- The hippocampus contributes to memory expression during transitive inference in miceHippocampus, 2009
- Nicotine withdrawal disrupts both foreground and background contextual fear conditioning but not pre-pulse inhibition of the acoustic startle response in C57BL/6 miceBehavioural Brain Research, 2008
- The Medial Temporal Lobe and Recognition MemoryAnnual Review of Neuroscience, 2007
- C57BL/6J mice exhibit reduced dopamine D3 receptor-mediated locomotor-inhibitory function relative to DBA/2J miceNeuroscience, 2006
- An fMRI Analysis of the Human Hippocampus: Inference, Context, and Task AwarenessJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2006
- Cognition stimulating drugs modulate protein kinase C activity in cerebral cortex and hippocampus of adult ratsLife Sciences, 1993