Reiss David, Walter Ondine, Bourgoin Lucie, Kieffer Brigitte L, Ouagazzal Abdel-Mouttalib
Département de Médecine Transrationnelle et neurogénétique, IGBMC (Institut de Génétique et de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire), 67400, Illkirch, France.
Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2014 Nov;231(22):4337-47. doi: 10.1007/s00213-014-3577-3. Epub 2014 Apr 27.
Recognition memory is an important aspect of human declarative memory and is one of the routine memory abilities altered in patients with amnestic syndrome and Alzheimer's disease. In rodents, recognition memory has been most widely assessed using the novel object preference paradigm, which exploits the spontaneous preference that animals display for novel objects. Here, we used nose-poke units instead of objects to design a simple automated method for assessing context recognition memory in mice.
In the acquisition trial, mice are exposed for the first time to an operant chamber with one blinking nose-poke unit. In the choice session, a novel nonblinking nose-poke unit is inserted into an empty spatial location and the number of nose poking dedicated to each set of nose-poke unit is used as an index of recognition memory.
We report that recognition performance varies as a function of the length of the acquisition period and the retention delay and is sensitive to conventional amnestic treatments. By manipulating the features of the operant chamber during a brief retrieval episode (3-min long), we further demonstrate that reconsolidation of the original contextual memory depends on the magnitude and the type of environmental changes introduced into the familiar spatial environment.
These results show that the nose-poke recognition task provides a rapid and reliable way for assessing context recognition memory in mice and offers new possibilities for the deciphering of the brain mechanisms governing the reconsolidation process.
识别记忆是人类陈述性记忆的一个重要方面，是遗忘综合征和阿尔茨海默病患者中改变的常规记忆能力之一。在啮齿动物中，识别记忆最广泛地使用新物体偏好范式进行评估，该范式利用动物对新物体表现出的自发偏好。在这里，我们使用鼻戳单元而非物体来设计一种简单的自动化方法，用于评估小鼠的情境识别记忆。
在获取试验中，小鼠首次接触带有一个闪烁鼻戳单元的操作箱。在选择阶段，将一个新的不闪烁鼻戳单元插入一个空的空间位置，并将用于每组鼻戳单元的鼻戳次数用作识别记忆的指标。
我们报告识别表现随获取期长度和保持延迟而变化，并且对传统遗忘处理敏感。通过在短暂的检索期（3分钟长）内操纵操作箱的特征，我们进一步证明原始情境记忆的重新巩固取决于引入熟悉空间环境中的环境变化的程度和类型。
这些结果表明，鼻戳识别任务为评估小鼠的情境识别记忆提供了一种快速且可靠的方法，并为解读控制重新巩固过程的脑机制提供了新的可能性。
