EARLY PROTEIN UNDERNUTRITION REDUCES ADULT RATS’ INTERTRIAL INTERVAL DURING CONDITIONAL DISCRIMINATION TASK

Abstract

Early malnutrition generates severe deleterious effects on growth, behavior and cognitive abilities of different organisms, and protein malnutrition is the main nutritional insufficiency that can be examined individually in experimental studies. The aim of this study was to establish conditional discriminations in rats, comparing malnourished animals which have received nutritional recovery with control ones, and test the effects of a correction procedure. Even though animals under the correction procedure have performed better than the animals not submitted to it, their performances did not improve during training sessions. Malnourished animals showed lower average ITIs than well-nourished animals. Contingency planning and the random spatial presentation of choice stimuli are the factors pointed out as potentially responsible for the absence of a learning curve to the conditional discrimination, at the end of training.Keywords: protein malnutrition; learning; conditional discrimination; correction procedure; ITI.