Environmental enrichment increases responding to contextual cues but decreases overall conditioned fear in the rat.
This study aimed at investigating the effects of environmental enrichment on various aspects of contextual processing in adult female rats. In experiment 1, simple conditioning was studied using either a training procedure allowing overshadowing of the contextual cues by signalling footshock with a discrete tone or a training procedure allowing a reduction of this overshadowing by explicitly unpairing the footshock and the tone. In experiment 2, contextual discrimination and contextual occasion-setting were assessed. Rats were daily exposed to two different contexts. In one context, a footshock was delivered 30s after the offset of a tone, whereas in the other context the same tone was presented alone. Experiment 3 examined familiarization to a new context. Experiment 1 showed that environmental enrichment reduced the overshadowing of contextual cues by the tone and also reduced freezing to the more predictive cue according to the training procedure used. Experiment 2 showed that environmental enrichment increased the ability of rats to discriminate two contexts. Experiment 3 showed that enriched rats familiarized faster to a new context than standard rats. Taken together, these results suggest that environmental enrichment in adult rats enhances learning about contextual cues and reduces overall fear associated with aversive events.
Laboratoire de Neurosciences Comportementales et Cognitives, FRE 2855, Université Louis Pasteur, CNRS, IFR 37 des Neurosciences, Strasbourg, France.
A
A
Barbelivien
K
K
Herbeaux
P
P
Oberling
C
C
Kelche
R
R
Galani
M
M
Majchrzak
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000009:adverse effects; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000818:Animals; D001245:Association Learning / Q000502:physiology; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D003214:Conditioning, Classical / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology; D004597:Electroshock / Q000009:adverse effects; D004777:Environment; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D046352:Freezing Reaction, Cataleptic / Q000502:physiology; D051381:Rats; D020318:Rats, Long-Evans