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.
Larson
S J
SJ
McMaster University, Department of Psychology, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Siegel
S
S
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