Early Onset of Age-Related Impairment of Aversive and Appetitive Learning in the SAM-P/8 Mouse

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Abstract
SAM-P/8 (P/8jf) mice, trained on aversive and appetitive training tasks, showed age-related impairment of learning on more difficult tasks. Using aversive training tasks, acquisition of step-down passive avoidance did not differ between 4-and 12-month-old mice. T-maze footshock avoidance acquisition detected impairment from 9 to 12 months of age. On the appetitive tasks, 12-month-old mice required significantly more trials than 4-month-old mice to learn to press a lever for milk reinforcement or to learn a specific sequence of 10 black-white, left-right discriminations. However, learning a simple black-white discrimination in the same 10-unit maze did not discriminate between the performance of 4-and 12-month-old mice. A lack of age-related changes in food, water, and milk consumption suggests that changes in motivation do not account for the decline in learning in older P/8jf mice. The results suggest an early onset of impaired learning relative to the 17.2-month median life span of the P/8jf mice

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