Effects of social instability stress in adolescence on long-term, not short-term, spatial memory performance

Abstract

There is evidence that exposure to stressors in adolescence leads to lasting deficits on hippocampal-dependent tasks, but whether medial prefrontal cortical function is also impaired is unknown. We previously found that rats exposed to social instability stress in adolescence (SS; daily 1h isolation and subsequent change of cage partner between postnatal days 30 and 45) had impaired memory performance on a Spatial Object Location test and in memory for fear conditioning context, tasks that depend on the integrity of the hippocampus. Here we investigated whether impaired performance would be evident after adolescent SS in male rats on a different test of hippocampal function, spatial learning and memory in the Morris water maze (MWM) and on a working memory task for which performance depends on the integrity of the medial prefrontal cortex, the Delayed Alternation task (DAT). During MWM testing, SS rats showed greater improvements in performance across trials within days compared to control (CTL) rats, but showed less retention of learning between days (48h) compared to CTL rats. Similarly, SS rats had impaired long-term memory in the Spatial Object Location test after a long delay (240min), but not after shorter delays (15 or 60min) compared to CTL rats. No group differences were observed on the DAT, which assessed working memory across brief delays (5–90s). Thus, deficits in memory performance after chronic social stress in adolescence may be limited to long-term memory.