Ethanol Self-Administration Pilot StudyEmily Koleske08/03/2016

Goals of the Study (Background)

• Alcohol is the most commonly used addictive substance in the US

• Excessive alcohol use can lead to neurological impairments and social problems such as alcoholism

• Alcoholism is a progressive and chronic disease

• The goal of this pilot study is to train rats to drink alcohol under a long axis paradigm

• The study will help understand the learning and behavioral mechanisms of addiction and when they stabilize

Ethanol Task (training)• Rats were given dipper boxes weighing approximately 60-80 g filled

w/10% EtOH solution w/0.1% saccharine

• There is a light delivered when the active lever is pressed

• 20 male Long-Evans rats, aged 6-7 weeks at the beginning of the study

• Each program runs for 180 minutes

• Active infusions, inactive infusions, dipper activations and magazine entries were recorded

0 20 40 60 80 100 1200

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R² = 0.819103478907304

Dippers Earned vs. Weight of EtOH Drunk

Dippers Earned

Wei

ght o

f EtO

H Dr

unk

(g)

Confirming the Correlation between Dippers Earned and EtOH Consumption

6 7 8 20 2150

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69.9

57.9

78.75

88.3

80.4

Dippers earned over Time (days)

Day

Dipp

ers E

arne

d

…

Dippers Earned after Learning Curve Verses After Three Weeks of Training

Frank Task• Probabilistic avoidance and reward learning• Combines 3 behaviors together with one task

Train (2 choice)

L1 L2

L4 L5

(30/70) (70/30)

(80/20) (20/80)

Test (novel combinations)

1415

25 24

Choose 1? Avoid 2?

Primary Goals of the Task• To understand the genetic and neural components that drive decision-

making behavior

• Adaptive learning from positive and negative outcomes

• Multiple roles for dopamine in the brain in reinforcement learning

• It is not known how non-human animals will respond to this task

Nose-Poke Training• 1 choice, forced-choice training• Rat nose pokes 101 times, gets rewarded for a singular port

only• After two days of 85 trials or more in the specified port, the rat

moves onto the unbiased• Unbiased• Rat is rewarded with a sugar pellet when he chooses any port

(1, 2, 4 or 5)• 201 trials• If the calculated p value is greater than or equal to 0.05 (not

significant) for ports 1 and 2 and ports 4 and 5, he will move on to the 2-choice

Nose-Poke Training Continued• 2-Choice (Frank Task)• 201 trials• Rat will choose between two portals (1 and 2 or 4 and 5), and will be

rewarded probabilistically

• Test (Probabilistic Selection Task)• 4 ports (1, 2, 4, 5), don’t get reinforced, novel combinations• Choose A, avoid B learning• 201 trials• Test 2 rats get 50% reinforcement

Predictions for Alcohol Dependence and Probabilistic Learning Task Convergence• Rats formerly trained on the nose-poke tasks will take longer to learn

the alcohol task

• Rats will perform more errors with the behavioral (choose A, avoid B) task after being exposed to alcohol (withdrawal, memory loss, etc.)

Goals for the Future and Possible Questions• To continue running the programs until we can see a more steady

plateau effect• Train ethanol-dependent animals on the probabilistic learning task• Do a reversal task with the active and inactive levers• Classical conditioning, light cue associated w/pressing of the active

lever, will reinstatement happen if we deprive them of this?• What if we more saccharin? Would the rats drink more? Would we

see correlations?