Atypical antipsychotics ameliorates learning impairments of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) antagonism during acquisition of an operant conditioning task.

M. RAPANELLI, L. R. FRICK, M. BERNARDEZ, B. S. ZANUTTO

Washington DC

Congreso; Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience; 2011

Society for Neuroscience

N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) plays a critical role in learning and memory. Besides, it has been shown that administration of NMDAR antagonists like ketamine, Mk801 or phenylciclidine in rodents mimics the negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Although, there is evidence of the cognitive impairments that NMDAR antagonist administration produces in animals, most of the research performed until the present has been related to working memory tasks. Here, we studied the effects of Mk801 administration and treatment with atypical antipsychotics during learning a reward dependent task like the operant conditioning. First, we found that rats injected with Mk801 (0.1mg/kg) showed a diminished performance in the first (p