Introduction
Environmental enrichment (EE) is any modification intended to provide an enhanced environment compared to the 'standard housing' (SH) conditions that laboratory animals are typically kept in
Nithianantharajah 2006. EE has been shown to rescue cognitive deficits in animal models of developmental, psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. Additionally, EE has been sometimes shown to enhance the performance of wildtype (WT) animals on a variety of cognitive behavioural tasks. This is well established for the hippocampal-dependent long-term memory tasks, the Morris water maze (MWM) and contextual fear conditioning (CFC). Attempts have also been made to examine the effects of EE on pattern separation (PS). Additionally, the effects of EE on working memory (WM) have been examined, with ambiguous results.
RAM,
SA,
DNMTL,
T-maze...
These tests are relevant, as deficits of working memory are common in schizophrenia. Following on from our previous work demonstrating how EE could rescue long-term memory deficits in an animal model of part of the cognitive endophenotype of schizophrenia, we wished to see whether...
Some of the ambiguity in previous testing is likely derived from the imprecise nature of these tasks...
The use of touchscreen operant chambers is able to overcome some of these issues...
As such, we hypothesised that EE would enhance the performance of mice on cognitive touchscreen tasks. In addition, we hypothesised that MTEP would induce deficits in working memory in mice which would be prevented by EE.