The influence of barbital on the activity and learning of white rats.

The effect of sodium phenobarbital on the learning behavior of white rats.

“…23, NO. 3 general direction from start to goal The plan of the maze is adopted from Husband (2) and is shown in figure 1. This maze is adopted because it has been shown to have a reliability of 0.88 when judged by the errors made on the odd and even runs and a reliability of 0.96 when the errors for the entire learning are correlated with those of the first 25 trials.…”

“…When this study was undertaken, there were no reports available to the authors of the effects of this drug on learning. Since it was started, two such studies have appeared (3,1). The differences in procedure between these experiments and the present study as well as certain contradictions in their published results justified the continuation of the present study and the presentation of its results.…”

The effect of repeated pentobarbital administration on learning.

“…No sex difference hi susceptibility has been observed in physiological studies of long-acting barbital or phenobarbital (11), the two drugs most commonly used in previous psychological investigations of this sort. However, it may also be noted that in the psychological studies, with two exceptions, either no sex breakdown was supplied (8,20,22) or only males were used (2,14,15,16). Boughton (4) provided information as to sex but comparisons are of doubtful value because of the small number of subjects and the lack of statistical treatment of the data.…”

“…Several experimenters have reported no detrimental effects on learning performance following various periods of barbiturate administration. In an early study Omwake (22) reported some apparent depressant effect of barbital on activity but concluded that there was no chronic detrimental influence on mental function. Although Omwake used large numbers of animals and injected them over a relatively long period of time, the unorthodox statistical treatment of the data, in terms of quartiles and medians with no tests of significance, makes them difficult to evaluate.…”

The effects of phenobarbital on learning and retention.

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Earlier attempts to study the effects of barbiturates on learning ability and retention (1,3,4,5) have employed white rats in a maze situation in which food or water were used as incentives. It has been shown, however (2), that phenobarbital has a direct effect on food and water intake and eating habits as well as on activity level, and therefore it is difficult to interpret the results of previously published experiments, since it is not possible to determine whether the drugs given may have affected the learning ability and retention directly or whether the effects which were observed were secondary to the effects of the drug on appetite and thirst.

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