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Early social deprivation disrupts
attentional but not affective shifts in the rat Early social deprivation produces behavioural and cognitive effects in rats that are suggestive of a general inflexibility in response selection, but the exact nature of the impaired cognitive functions is unclear. We examined two dissociable forms of inhibitory control of behaviour that operate at two different levels of response selection, namely affective shifts within perceptual dimensions (reversal learning), and attentional shifts from one perceptual dimension to another (extra-dimensional shift). 48 rats were trained on the radial maze to locate baited arms on the basis of either (i) spatial position, or (ii) visual cues at the end of arms (four each of two exemplars). All other cues were made irrelevant by random maze-rotation and redistribution of cues between trials. Isolates and social controls did not differ in acquisition and reversal learning within sets of either spatial or non-spatial stimuli, whereas isolates were selectively impaired in shifting attention from spatial to non-spatial stimuli, and vice versa (P<0.01). These findings demonstrate a selective impairment in socially deprived rats of a higher-order cognitive function that has been shown in rats, primates, and man, to be mediated by prefrontal cortex. It highlights the significance of the postweaning environment for the normal development and welfare of rats and may represent a non-invasive animal model for a key symptom of human prefrontal dysfunction. Keywords: cognition, attention, set-shifting, isolation-rearing, rats |
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