Winner or loser? Reduced memory ability after winning a fight in the crab Neohelice granulata

M JIMENA SANTOS; LAURA KACZER; ME PEDREIRA

Mar del Plata

Congreso; XXX Congreso Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencia (SAN).; 2015

It has been demonstrated in both animal models and humans that social stressful events can change the properties of memory processes. In this sense, a relationship between social rank and memory has been proposed in several studies. Thus, the aim of this study was to analyze the role of an agonistic experience, as the event which induced social stress, on the contextual Pavlovian conditioning (CPC) in the crab. Each experiment consisted of an agonistic phase and a memory one. During the former, matched pairs of male crabs were staged in a 10-min encounter and the dominant or subordinate condition of each member of the dyad was determined. Immediately after the encounter crabs were trained to acquire CPC and tested 24h later. Results showed that the agonistic encounter can modulate memory according to the dominance condition; in such a way that memory retention of subordinates results higher than that of dominants. Further, this difference in memory retention was maintained even when increasing the intensity of the US. Importantly, a comparison between the acquisition phase of dominants and subordinates did not reveal any divergences. Thus, we propose that the agonistic experience differently modulated the crab?s memory consolidation. Future experiments will allow us to address the mechanisms of this modulation, and determine whether this result can be expanded to other memory phases, such as the reconsolidation, and to other learning tasks.