title: Spontaneously hypertensive, Wistar Kyoto and Sprague-Dawley rats differ in their use of place and response strategies in the water radial arm maze.
abstract: This study further characterises the use of mnemonic systems in the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR), which is frequently used as a rodent model of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The objective of this study was to assess the preference of male SHR, Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) and Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats for a place or response strategy when trained on an ambiguous T-maze task, and also to examine whether all strains acquired information about both strategies during ambiguous training, regardless of their preferred strategy. In the first experiment, SHR and WKY showed a preference for a response strategy on the ambiguous T-maze task; in contrast, SD displayed a preference for a place strategy. In the second experiment, all strains demonstrated that they learned information about both the response and place strategies during ambiguous training. However, on a conditioned place preference test SHR did not display as strong a preference for the place arm as WKY and SD. This finding supports previous research in a conditioned cue preference test, in which SHR did not display a preference for the cue associated with the platform. These observations that the strains differ with respect to behavioural strategy in a learning task suggest that they differ in the underlying neural circuitry that serves goal-directed behaviour, and are consistent with SHR having deficits associated with the nucleus accumbens.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1. koreen.clements@anatomy.otago.ac.nz
authors.forename: K M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Clements
authors.forename: A J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Saunders
authors.forename: B-A
authors.initials: BA
authors.lastname: Robertson
authors.forename: P E
authors.initials: PE
authors.lastname: Wainwright
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D006973:Hypertension / Q000235:genetics / Q000503:physiopathology*; D008297:Male; D018782:Maze Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D051381:Rats; D011918:Rats, Inbred SHR; D011921:Rats, Inbred WKY; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013045:Species Specificity