Effects of injections of glucose into the dorsal striatum on learning of place and response mazes

Abstract

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that facilitation of striatal function with intra-striatal glucose injections would facilitate learning a striatum-dependent response maze and impair learning a hippocampus-dependent place maze. Food-deprived Sprague–Dawley male rats were trained to find food in a Y-maze. In the place version of the maze, rats were rewarded for learning to go to an arm located in a fixed location while in the response task rats were rewarded for consistently turning in the same direction at the choice point. Artificial cerebrospinal fluid (1 μL) containing either 0.7 nmol of glucose (control) or 20 nmol of glucose was injected bilaterally into the dorsal striatum immediately before training. The animals were trained to a criterion of 9/10 correct choices. In the place maze, glucose injections impaired learning, as measured by number of trials required to reach 9/10 correct. However, in the response task, glucose injections did not enhance learning. A subsequent experiment examined the effects of intra-striatal glucose injections on acquisition of the response task under two different visual cue conditions, addition of an intra-maze light cue that predicted the correct arm or with removal of most visual extramaze cues. Glucose again failed to facilitate acquisition of the response task under these conditions. These findings suggest that facilitation of striatal function via intra-striatal glucose injections is sufficient to impair place learning but not to enhance response learning, perhaps separating the neurochemical mechanisms for striatal involvement in impairment of place and enhancement of response learning.