Adrenergic enhancement of consolidation of object recognition memory.
Extensive evidence indicates that epinephrine (EPI) modulates memory consolidation for emotionally arousing tasks in animals and human subjects. However, previous studies have not examined the effects of EPI on consolidation of recognition memory. Here we report that systemic administration of EPI enhances consolidation of memory for a novel object recognition (NOR) task under different training conditions. Control male rats given a systemic injection of saline (0.9% NaCl) immediately after NOR training showed significant memory retention when tested at 1.5 or 24, but not 96h after training. In contrast, rats given a post-training injection of EPI showed significant retention of NOR at all delays. In a second experiment using a different training condition, rats treated with EPI, but not SAL-treated animals, showed significant NOR retention at both 1.5 and 24-h delays. We next showed that the EPI-induced enhancement of retention tested at 96h after training was prevented by pretraining systemic administration of the beta-adrenoceptor antagonist propranolol. The findings suggest that, as previously observed in experiments using aversively motivated tasks, epinephrine modulates consolidation of recognition memory and that the effects require activation of beta-adrenoceptors.
Dornelles
Arethuza
A
Neurobiology and Developmental Biology, Laboratory and Graduate Program in Cellular and Molecular Biology, Faculty of Biosciences, Pontifical Catholic University, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil.
de Lima
Maria Noemia Martins
MN
Grazziotin
Manoela
M
Presti-Torres
Juliana
J
Garcia
Vanessa Athaide
VA
Scalco
Felipe Siciliani
FS
Roesler
Rafael
R
Schröder
Nadja
N
D000704:Analysis of Variance; D000818:Animals; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology; D004837:Epinephrine / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D051381:Rats; D017208:Rats, Wistar; D011943:Receptors, Adrenergic, beta / Q000502:physiology*; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D012153:Retention, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric
D011943:Receptors, Adrenergic, beta; D004837:Epinephrine