Learning and tolerance to the ataxic effect of ethanol.
It has been well documented that drug-associated cues are important for the development and expression of drug tolerance. The Pavlovian conditioning analysis of tolerance emphasizes the importance of a drug-associated cues to tolerance by equating a drug administration with a learning trial. According to this analysis, tolerance should be subject to external inhibition, the disruption of a conditional response by a novel stimulus. We previously reported that tolerance to the ataxic effect of ethanol was attenuated by a novel strobe/noise presentation (31). In this article we report evidence of a compensatory CR in rats tolerant to the ataxic effect of ethanol as tested on the tilting plane. Both the compensatory CR and tolerance were disrupted by the presentation of a novel strobe/noise stimulus providing converging evidence that the attenuation of tolerance by a novel stimulus results from external inhibition of Pavlovian conditioning. The disruption of ethanol tolerance and the conditional response mediating tolerance was also apparent when the novel omission of the strobe/noise stimulus was used as the external inhibitor in rats made tolerant to ethanol with the stimulus on. Finally, we have shown that the disruptive effect of a novel stimulus on ethanol tolerance is decreased when there is a 10-day delay between the final tolerance development session and testing, demonstrating that the interval between training and testing is important when assessing associative tolerance.
McMaster University, Department of Psychology, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
S J
SJ
Larson
S
S
Siegel
D000818:Animals; D001259:Ataxia / Q000139:chemically induced* / Q000523:psychology*; D002492:Central Nervous System Depressants / Q000494:pharmacology*; D003216:Conditioning, Operant / Q000187:drug effects; D004361:Drug Tolerance; D000431:Ethanol / Q000494:pharmacology*; D007858:Learning / Q000187:drug effects*; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley
D002492:Central Nervous System Depressants; D000431:Ethanol