title: Effects of fluoxetine on hippocampal-dependent and hippocampal-independent learning tasks.
abstract: It is generally assumed that fluoxetine does not produce cognitive impairments, based on observations that fluoxetine-treated animals do not show impairment in learning the spatial water-maze task. As fluoxetine has different effects on different brain regions and as learning is not a unitary phenomenon, it may be the case that fluoxetine has different effects on different types of learning and memory paradigms. In this study, 15 male Sprague-Dawley rats were given chronic injections of either fluoxetine or saline and received training in two hippocampal-independent tasks in addition to a spatial water-maze task. The two hippocampal-independent tasks were a short-delay appetitive Pavlovian-conditioning task and an object-recognition task. The results showed that the fluoxetine-injected rats did not show any impairment relative to the saline controls in either the acquisition or the retention phases of the water-maze task, but were significantly impaired in both of the hippocampal-independent tasks. Fluoxetine-injected rats spent significantly less time exploring the novel object in the object-recognition task and took longer to learn the association between the conditional stimulus and the appetitive unconditional stimulus in the appetitive Pavlovian-conditioning task.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York 13820, USA.
authors.forename: Jessica A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Valluzzi
authors.forename: KinHo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Chan
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001070:Appetitive Behavior / Q000187:drug effects; D003214:Conditioning, Classical / Q000187:drug effects*; D005473:Fluoxetine / Q000494:pharmacology*; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000187:drug effects* / Q000378:metabolism; D008297:Male; D018782:Maze Learning / Q000187:drug effects*; D011897:Random Allocation; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D017367:Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors / Q000494:pharmacology*
chemical_list: D005473:Fluoxetine; D017367:Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors