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The role of the cholinergic system and the perirhinal cortex in stimulus processing

Reference	BB/C006283/1
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Dr Jasper Robinson
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors	Mr Peter Jones
Institution	University of Nottingham
Department	Sch of Psychology
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	229,307
Status	Completed
Type	Research Grant
Start date	01/09/2005
End date	28/02/2009
Duration	42 months

Abstract

The programme will examine three related areas in the study of the psychological and neural mechanisms of learning and memory. Rats will be used as subjects in all experiments; in some experiments damage to the perirhinal cortex will be produced by infusions of excitoxins before behavioural procedure, in other experiments the muscarinic cholinergic antagonist, scopolamine will be given by systemic injection before behavioural procedure; some experiments will employ only behavioural techniques. 1. Contextual conditioning. Rats will be given Pavlovian conditioning in which a foot shock will be paired with a particular context; this will be done with contexts composed of separable context elements in a sensory preconditioning procedure. Other, noncontextual, forms of sensory preconditioning will be used in which rats instead receive compound stimuli composed of audio-visual elements. A flavour-conditioning sensory preconditioning procedure will also be used. The effect of perirhinal lesions on these effects will be examined to provide detailed information about current theories of the function of the perirhinal cortex in the formation of unitised stimulus representations. 2. Recognition memory. The spontaneous object recognition task will involve placing rats in an arena to freely explore novel and familiar objects. In variants of this procedure, objects will be baited with food and generalisation to alternative objects. In the other procedure, rats will receive appetitive conditioning in operant chambers. Auditory stimuli will be used to signal delivery of food and generalisation to other stimuli will be used to indicate rat detection of the novelty or familiarity of stimuli. These behavioural techniques will be employed in conjunction with lesions and scopolamine to examine processes of recognition memory and the detection of novelty and familiarity. 3. Habituation. Rats will receive presentations of a brief light (given in operant chambers). The habituation of theirorienting response to the light is predicted to habituate more slowly when given, either, pre-training perirhinal lesions or injections of scopolamine. In another procedure, rats will be able to become familiarised with objects on a number of trials. Groups will differ in the interval between presentations; groups receiving longer intervals are predicted to show stronger object recognition. If supported, these predictions would support the notion that habituation and recognition memory operate by related neural and psychological processes.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Animal Sciences (AS)
Research Topics	Neuroscience and Behaviour
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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