The influence of early maternal care on perceptual attentional set shifting and stress reactivity in adult rats

Abstract

Stress influences a wide variety of outcomes including cognitive processing. In the rat, early life maternal care can influence developing offspring to affect both stress reactivity and cognitive processes in adulthood. The current study assessed if variations in early life maternal care can influence cognitive performance on a task, the ability to switch cognitive sets, dependent on the medial prefrontal cortex. Early in life, offspring was reared under High or Low maternal Licking conditions. As adults, they were trained daily and then tested on an attentional set-shifting task (ASST), which targets cognitive flexibility in rodents. Stress-sensitive behavioral and neural markers were assayed before and after the ASST. High and Low Licking offspring performed equally well on the ASST despite initial, but not later, differences in stress axis functioning. These results suggest that early life maternal care does not impact the accuracy of attentional set-shifting in rats. These findings may be of particular importance for those interested in the relationship between early life experience and adult cognitive function.ß 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol

Prefrontal cortex VAMP1 gene network moderates the effect of the early environment on cognitive flexibility in children

“…Regarding the effect of the early environment, the present findings are consistent with previous studies, both in animal models and in humans, that have pointed to the susceptibility of cognitive flexibility to the milieu in which the individual is raised (Harms et al, 2018;Lazzaretti et al, 2018;Romero-Martínez et al, 2013;Sakhai, Saxton, & Francis, 2016;Xu et al, 2016). Our gene network was built around a select set of genes co-expressed with VAMP1, a SNARE complex protein, whose functionality in human cortex has been related to some cognitive abilities (Ramos- Miguel et al, 2018).…”

Sow-Piglet Nose Contacts in Free-Farrowing Pens

“…Mother–offspring contact has crucial effects on offspring development. Studies in rodents have shown that grooming and licking of the pups by the mother have a major impact on social and neurological development and the stress-coping abilities of the offspring [1,2,3]. In farm animal husbandry, mother–offspring contact is often greatly restricted or even absent.…”

Repeated abortion in adulthood induces cognition impairment in aged mice

“…Cognitive psychologists study things that people do in their heads and how they subsequently perform based on those mental operations 1 . Approximately half of all women who have an abortion have had one or more previous abortions.…”