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Free keywords:
Mouse, Hippecampus, Delayed nonmatching-tolocation, Touchscreen operant chamber, Spatial working memory, Spatial pattern separation
Abstract:
The hippocampus is implicated in many of the cognitive impairments
observed in conditions such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and
schizophrenia (SCZ). Often, mice are the species of choice for models of
these diseases and the study of the relationship between brain and
behaviour more generally. Thus, automated and efficient
hippocampal-sensitive cognitive tests for the mouse are important for
developing therapeutic targets for these diseases, and understanding
brain-behaviour relationships. One promising option is to adapt the
touchscreen-based trial-unique nonmatching-to-location (TUNL) task that
has been shown to be sensitive to hippocampal dysfunction in the rat.
This study aims to adapt the TUNL task for use in mice and to test for
hippocampus-dependency of the task.
TUNL training protocols were altered such that C57BL/6 mice were able to
acquire the task. Following acquisition, dysfunction of the dorsal
hippocampus (dHp) was induced using a fibre-sparing excitotoxin, and the
effects of manipulation of several task parameters were examined.
Mice could acquire the TUNL task using training optimised for the mouse
(experiments 1). TUNL was found to be sensitive to dHp dysfunction in
the mouse (experiments 2, 3 and 4). In addition, we observed that
performance of dHp dysfunction group was somewhat consistently lower
when sample locations were presented in the centre of the screen.
This study opens up the possibility of testing both mouse and rat models
on this flexible and hippocampus-sensitive touchscreen task.
