Racine student presents research at seventh annual Celebration of Scholars event

2017 May 2

Carthage College held the seventh annual Celebration of Scholars event on Friday, April 28, 2017. Celebration of Scholars is a poster exhibition that features original research, scholarship, and creative work completed by Carthage students.

Lucinda Krenzke of Racine presented "Partially Reinforced Wistar-Kyoto Female Rats Show An Increase In Avoidance Acquisition Compared To Fully Reinforced Sprague Dawley Rats During A Lever-Press Avoidance Task" at the event.

This is the project's abstract:

"The behaviorally inhibited Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) strain has been studied extensively as a model for anxiety vulnerability. WKY rats acquire signaled lever-press avoidance more rapidly and they are resistant to extinguishing the avoidance response when compared to Sprague Dawley (SD) rats (e.g., Servatius et al, 2008). Recently it was demonstrated that learning in behaviorally inhibited humans was less affected by partial reinforcement during Pavlovian eye blink conditioning (Allen et al., 2014). In the present study, we questioned how behaviorally inhibited WKY rats will react to complete or partial reinforcement in a lever-press avoidance paradigm. We compared avoidance acquisition in female WKY versus female SD rats receiving either 100% reinforcement of paired tone-shock trials or 50% partial reinforcement with inconsistent tone only trials. WKY rats receiving 100% reinforcement showed the highest levels of acquisition followed by WKY rats receiving 50% reinforcement. SD rats receiving 100% reinforcement showed lower rates of acquisition than either of the WKY rat contingencies, and WKY rats receiving 50% reinforcement had very little avoidance acquisition. Our results suggest that female WKY rats are extremely influenced by the tone-shock reinforcement even when it is inconsistent. Such enhanced associative learning in vulnerable populations could be a major factor in the development of anxiety and stress disorders. To further study this relationship, we are performing immunohistochemical screens to identify differentially activated circuits underlying avoidance learning in WKY and SD rats."