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Prenatal choline supplementation alters the timing, emotion, and memory performance (TEMP) of adult male and female rats as indexed by differential reinforcement of low-rate schedule behavior

  • ️Sat Mar 01 2008
  1. Ruey-Kuang Cheng,
  2. Christopher J. MacDonald,
  3. Christina L. Williams, and
  4. Warren H. Meck1
  1. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Genome Sciences Research Building II, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA

Abstract

Choline availability in the maternal diet has a lasting effect on brain and behavior of the offspring. To further delineate the impact of early nutritional status, we examined effects of prenatal-choline supplementation on timing, emotion, and memory performance of adult male and female rats. Rats that were given sufficient choline (CON: 1.1 g/kg) or supplemental choline (SUP: 5.0 g/kg) during embryonic days (ED) 12–17 were trained with a differential reinforcement of low-rate (DRL) schedule that was gradually transitioned through 5-, 10-, 18-, 36-, and 72-sec criterion times. We observed that SUP-females emitted more reinforced responses than CON-females, which were more efficient than both groups of males. In addition, SUP-males and SUP-females exhibited a reduction in burst responding (response latencies <2 sec) compared with both groups of CON rats. Furthermore, despite a reduced level of burst responding, the SUP-males made more nonreinforced responses prior to the DRL criterion as a result of maintaining the previous DRL criterion following transition to a new criterion. In summary, long-lasting effects of prenatal-choline supplementation were exhibited by reduced frustrative DRL responding in conjunction with the persistence of temporal memory in SUP-males and enhanced temporal exploration and response efficiency in SUP-females.

Footnotes

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