Departamento de Psicobiología y Metodología de las Ciencias del Comportamiento, Instituto de Investigación Biomédica de Málaga (IBIMA), Facultad de Psicología, Universidad de Málaga, Spain.
Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Warsaw, Poland.
Neuroscience. 2018 Sep 15;388:374-383. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2018.07.036. Epub 2018 Aug 4.
Exposure to environmental enrichment (EE) has been a useful model for studying the effects of experience on brain plasticity, but to date, few is known about the impact of this condition on the brain functional networks that probably underlies the multiple behavioral improvements. Hence, we assessed the effect of an EE protocol in adult Wistar rats on the performance in several behavioral tasks testing different domains (Open field (OP): locomotor activity; Elevated-zero maze (EZM): anxiety-related behaviors; 5-choice serial reaction time task (5-CSRTT): attentional processes; 4-arm radial water maze (4-RAWM): spatial memory) in order to check its effectiveness in a wide range of functions. After this, we analyzed the functional brain connectivity underlying each experimental condition through cytochrome C oxidase (COx) histochemistry. Our EE protocol reduced both locomotor activity in the OP and anxiety-related behaviors in the EZM. On the other hand, enriched rats showed more accuracy in the 4-RAWM, whereas 5-CSRTT performance was not significantly ameliorated by EE condition. In relation to COx functional connectivity, we found that EE reduced the number of strong positive correlations both in basal and training conditions, suggesting a modulating effect on specific brain connections. Our results suggest that EE seems to have a selective effect on specific brain regions, such as prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, leading to a more efficient brain connectivity.
暴露于环境丰富（EE）一直是研究经验对大脑可塑性影响的有用模型，但迄今为止，人们对这种情况对可能是多种行为改善基础的大脑功能网络的影响知之甚少。因此，我们评估了 EE 方案对成年 Wistar 大鼠的影响，以检查其在多项行为任务（开阔场（OP）：运动活动；高架零迷宫（EZM）：焦虑相关行为；5-选择连续反应时间任务（5-CSRTT）：注意力过程；4 臂放射状水迷宫（4-RAWM）：空间记忆）中的性能，以检查其在广泛功能中的有效性。之后，我们通过细胞色素 C 氧化酶（COx）组织化学分析了每种实验条件下的功能大脑连接。我们的 EE 方案减少了 OP 中的运动活动和 EZM 中的焦虑相关行为。另一方面，丰富环境中的大鼠在 4-RAWM 中表现出更高的准确性，而 5-CSRTT 性能并未因 EE 条件而得到显著改善。关于 COx 功能连接，我们发现 EE 减少了基础和训练条件下强正相关的数量，这表明对特定脑连接具有调节作用。我们的结果表明，EE 似乎对特定脑区（如前额叶皮层和海马体）具有选择性影响，从而导致更有效的大脑连接。
