Doublet Thomas, Nosrati Mona, Kentros Clifford G
Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and Centre for Neural Computation, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2022 Jul 13;16:902675. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2022.902675. eCollection 2022.
Interactions between conspecifics are central to the acquisition of useful memories in the real world. Observational learning, i.e., learning a task by observing the success or failure of others, has been reported in many species, including rodents. However, previous work in rats with NMDA-receptor blockade has shown that even extensive observation of an unexplored space through a clear barrier is not sufficient to generate a stable hippocampal representation of that space. This raises the question of whether rats can learn a spatial task in a purely observed space from watching a conspecific, and if so, does this somehow stabilize their hippocampal representation? To address these questions, we designed an observational spatial task in a two-part environment that is nearly identical to that of the aforementioned electrophysiological study, in which an observer rat watches a demonstrator animal to learn the location of a hidden reward. Our results demonstrate that rats do not need to physically explore an environment to learn a reward location, provided a conspecific demonstrates where it is. We also show that the behavioral memory is not affected by NMDA receptor blockade, suggesting that the spatial representation underlying the behavior has been consolidated by observation alone.
同种个体之间的互动对于在现实世界中获取有用记忆至关重要。观察性学习，即通过观察他人的成功或失败来学习一项任务，已在包括啮齿动物在内的许多物种中得到报道。然而，先前对NMDA受体阻断的大鼠的研究表明，即使通过透明屏障对未探索空间进行广泛观察，也不足以在海马体中生成该空间的稳定表征。这就提出了一个问题：大鼠能否通过观察同种个体在纯粹观察到的空间中学习空间任务？如果可以，这是否会以某种方式稳定它们在海马体中的表征？为了解决这些问题，我们在一个两部分的环境中设计了一个观察性空间任务，该环境与上述电生理研究的环境几乎相同，在这个任务中，一只观察大鼠观察一只示范动物来学习隐藏奖励的位置。我们的结果表明，只要有同种个体展示奖励的位置，大鼠无需亲自探索环境就能学习奖励位置。我们还表明，行为记忆不受NMDA受体阻断的影响，这表明该行为背后的空间表征仅通过观察就得到了巩固。
