LAD rats learn a three-key drug discrimination more rapidly and achieve a higher level of performance than HAD rats.
High-alcohol drinking (HAD1) and low-alcohol drinking (LAD1) rats were trained to discriminate among 0.75 g/kg ethanol, 1.5 g/kg ethanol and saline under a fixed-ratio 10 schedule. LAD rats learned the discrimination more rapidly than HAD rats, and asymptotic performance by LAD rats was better than that of HAD rats. The 0.75 g/kg dose of ethanol failed to control the responding of HAD rats, both when baseline responding stabilized and during the determination of an ethanol dose-response curve. These differences between LAD and HAD rats in ethanol discrimination were not observed in previous experiments using a two-choice procedure. The three-choice procedure may be useful for establishing strain differences in ethanol discrimination. These and previous experiments with alcohol-preferring rats suggest that the learning of an ethanol discrimination may be dissociable from voluntary ethanol consumption in rat strains bred selectively to consume ethanol.
McMillan
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Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, College of Medicine, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, 4301 West Markham Street, Little Rock, AR 72205, USA. mcmillandonalde@uams.edu
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D000428:Alcohol Drinking / Q000235:genetics*; D000818:Animals; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D004305:Dose-Response Relationship, Drug; D000431:Ethanol / Q000494:pharmacology*; D005838:Genotype; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000502:physiology; D009042:Motivation; D051381:Rats; D012641:Selection, Genetic
D000431:Ethanol