We have previously reported that sound sequence discrimination learning requires cholinergic inputs to the auditory cortex (AC) in rats. In that study, reward was used for motivating discrimination behavior in rats. Therefore, dopaminergic inputs mediating reward signals may have an important role in the learning. We tested the possibility in the present study. Rats were trained to discriminate...

Amiloride-insensitive sodium taste transduction is severely limited by large anions (i.e., gluconate). We found that in a brief-access taste test, sodium-depleted rats exhibited similar levels of increased licking to several sodium salts regardless of anion but did not increase licking to nonsodium salts compared with water. The enhanced licking of sodium salts was abolished in the presence of ...

Purkinje cells (PCs) are a major site of information integration and plasticity in the cerebellum, a brain region involved in motor task refinement. Thus PCs provide an ideal location for studying the mechanisms necessary for cerebellum-dependent motor learning. Increasingly, sophisticated behavior tasks, used in combination with genetic reporters and effectors of activity, have opened up the p...

The present study investigated the effects of isolation rearing, through the artificial rearing paradigm (AR), on the hormonal induction of maternal behavior (MB) in female Sprague-Dawley rats. Between postnatal days (PND) 4 and 18, rat pups were raised either with their mothers (MR) or artificially, without their mothers (AR). As well, some of the AR pups were provided with additional maternal...

Radioactive water injected into 10-day-old rats were recovered the following day from their mothers' blood. This transfer of water was nearly eliminated by ligating the injected pups' urethras, a result indicating that mother rats consume their offspring's urine. Preventing urine consumption by ligating urethras of all pups in a litter doubled the plasma volume deficit in dams produced by 24 hr...

Variations in maternal care affect the development of individual differences in neuroendocrine responses to stress in rats. As adults, the offspring of mothers that exhibited more licking and grooming of pups during the first 10 days of life showed reduced plasma adrenocorticotropic hormone and corticosterone responses to acute stress, increased hippocampal glucocorticoid receptor messenger RNA...