An investigation into the environmental parameters influencing recognition learning and memory in rodents
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Decades of research on species across the animal kingdom highlight the importance of sleep for optimum learning and performance of cognitive tasks. The sleep-memory consolidation hypothesis characterizes sleep as a brain state optimal for stabilizing processes that strengthen and integrate a memory into a long-term store. Although this is widely accepted at a physiological level, a nuanced understanding of how sleep facilitates memory consolidation is yet to be achieved. Of particular interest is demystifying how the homeostatic sleep drive and circadian system both singly and jointly influence memory performance. Other relevant considerations include the roles of the performance measure, task complexity and methodology. The present study investigates whether, and to what extent, variable combinations of experimenter handling, sleep deprivation, task complexity, and time of testing differentially impact rodent cognitive performance. Recognition memory was evaluated using four versions of the Novel Object Recognition (NOR) task. Handled mice outperformed their non-handled counterparts across every combination of delay phase duration and lighting condition during testing. It also appears that memory performance on a simple NOR task is more resistant to circadian modulation and the impairing effects of sleep deprivation than on a complex NOR task. Further work is merited in order to elucidate how sleep and circadian rhythms synergistically act to afford mammalian learning, but this study underscores the importance of environmental parameters for recognition memory.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Gessner, Nicholas |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Heller, H. Craig |
| Advisor | O'Connell, Lauren |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Biology, 2021 |
Subjects
| Subject | Biology |
|---|---|
| Subject | Neurobiology |
| Subject | Sleep deprivation |
| Subject | Circadian rhythms |
| Subject | Memory consolidation |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-SA).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Gessner, Nicholas, Heller, H. Craig, O'Connell, Lauren. (2021). An investigation into the environmental parameters influencing recognition learning and memory in rodents. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/yv149ky7270
Collection
Undergraduate Theses, Department of Biology, 2020-2021
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- Contact
- nickgess@stanford.edu
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