2. Goals of the Study (Background)
• Alcohol is the most commonly used addictive substance in the US
• Excessive alcohol use can lead to neurological impairments and
social problems such as alcoholism
• Alcoholism is a progressive and chronic disease
• The goal of this pilot study is to train rats to drink alcohol under a
long axis paradigm
• The study will help understand the learning and behavioral
mechanisms of addiction and when they stabilize
3. Ethanol Task (training)
• Rats were given dipper boxes weighing approximately 60-80 g filled
w/10% EtOH solution w/0.1% saccharine
• There is a light delivered when the active lever is pressed
• 20 male Long-Evans rats, aged 6-7 weeks at the beginning of the study
• Each program runs for 180 minutes
• Active infusions, inactive infusions, dipper activations and magazine
entries were recorded
4. R² = 0.8191
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
WeightofEtOHDrunk(g)
Dippers Earned
Dippers Earned vs. Weight of EtOH Drunk
Confirming the Correlation between Dippers Earned and EtOH Consumption
7. Frank Task
• Probabilistic avoidance and reward learning
• Combines 3 behaviors together with one task
Train (2 choice)
L1 L2
L4 L5
(30/70) (70/30)
(80/20) (20/80)
Test
(novel combinations)
1415
25 24
Choose 1? Avoid 2?
8. Primary Goals of the Task
• To understand the genetic and neural components that drive
decision-making behavior
• Adaptive learning from positive and negative outcomes
• Multiple roles for dopamine in the brain in reinforcement learning
• It is not known how non-human animals will respond to this task
9. Nose-Poke Training
• 1 choice, forced-choice training
• Rat nose pokes 101 times, gets rewarded for a singular port
only
• After two days of 85 trials or more in the specified port, the rat
moves onto the unbiased
• Unbiased
• Rat is rewarded with a sugar pellet when he chooses any port
(1, 2, 4 or 5)
• 201 trials
• If the calculated p value is greater than or equal to 0.05 (not
significant) for ports 1 and 2 and ports 4 and 5, he will move
on to the 2-choice
10. Nose-Poke Training Continued
• 2-Choice (Frank Task)
• 201 trials
• Rat will choose between two portals (1 and 2 or 4 and 5), and will
be rewarded probabilistically
• Test (Probabilistic Selection Task)
• 4 ports (1, 2, 4, 5), don’t get reinforced, novel combinations
• Choose A, avoid B learning
• 201 trials
• Test 2 rats get 50% reinforcement
11. Predictions for Alcohol Dependence and
Probabilistic Learning Task Convergence
• Rats formerly trained on the nose-poke tasks will take longer to learn
the alcohol task
• Rats will perform more errors with the behavioral (choose A, avoid B)
task after being exposed to alcohol (withdrawal, memory loss, etc.)
12. Goals for the Future and Possible Questions
• To continue running the programs until we can see a more steady
plateau effect
• Train ethanol-dependent animals on the probabilistic learning task
• Do a reversal task with the active and inactive levers
• Classical conditioning, light cue associated w/pressing of the active
lever, will reinstatement happen if we deprive them of this?
• What if we more saccharin? Would the rats drink more? Would we
see correlations?
