Dorsal hippocampal damage disrupts the auditory context-dependent attenuation of taste neophobia in mice
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Show full item recordEditorial
Elsevier BV
Materia
Context Hippocampus Lesion Memory Neophobia Taste
Date
2018-12-15Referencia bibliográfica
Grau-Perales, A. B., Levy, E. R. J., Fenton, A. A., & Gallo, M. (2019). Dorsal hippocampal damage disrupts the auditory context-dependent attenuation of taste neophobia in mice. Neurobiology of learning and memory, 157, 121-127.
Sponsorship
This work was supported by the research projects PSI2014-57643-P and PSI2017-86381-P (MINECO, Spain).Abstract
Rodents exhibit neophobia for novel tastes, demonstrated by an initial reluctance to drink novel-tasting, potentially-
aversive solutions. Taste neophobia attenuates across days if the solution is not aversive, demonstrated
by increased consumption as the solution becomes familiar. This attenuation of taste neophobia is context dependent,
which has been demonstrated by maintained reluctance to drink the novel tasting solution if the subject
has to drink it after being brought to a novel environment. This spatial context-dependent attenuation of taste
neophobia has been described and likely depends on the integrity of the dorsal hippocampus because this brain
area is crucial for representing space and spatial context associations, but is unnecessary for processing taste
memories per se. Whether changing the non-spatial auditory context causes a similar effect on attenuation of
taste neophobia and the potential role of the dorsal hippocampus in processing this decidedly non-spatial information
has not been determined. Here we demonstrate that changing the non-spatial auditory context affects
the attenuation of taste neophobia in mice, and investigate the consequence of hippocampal lesion. The results
demonstrate that the non-spatial auditory context-dependent attenuation of taste neophobia in mice is lost
following NMDA excitotoxic lesions of the CA1 region of the dorsal hippocampus. These findings demonstrate
that the dorsal hippocampus is crucial for the modulation non-associative taste learning by auditory context,
neither of which provide information about space.