Institute of Systems Neuroscience, Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France.
Epilepsia. 2022 Dec;63(12):e150-e155. doi: 10.1111/epi.17421. Epub 2022 Oct 17.
Individuals use the observation of a conspecific to learn new behaviors and skills in many species. Whether observational learning is affected in epilepsy is not known. Using the pilocarpine rat model of epilepsy, we assessed learning by observation in a spatial task. The task involves a naive animal observing a demonstrator animal seeking a reward at a specific spatial location. After five observational sessions, the observer is allowed to explore the rewarded space and look for the reward. Although control observer rats succeed in finding the reward when allowed to explore the rewarded space, epileptic animals fail. However, epileptic animals are able to successfully learn the location of the reward through their own experience after several trial sessions. Thus, epileptic animals show a clear deficit in learning by observation. This result may be clinically relevant, in particular in children who strongly rely on observational learning.
个体通过观察同种动物来学习许多物种的新行为和技能。在癫痫中是否会影响观察性学习尚不清楚。使用匹鲁卡品大鼠癫痫模型，我们评估了在空间任务中通过观察进行的学习。该任务涉及一只幼稚的动物观察一只示范动物在特定的空间位置寻找奖励。经过五次观察课程后，观察者可以探索奖励空间并寻找奖励。尽管允许对照组观察者大鼠探索奖励空间时成功找到了奖励，但癫痫动物却失败了。然而，癫痫动物在经过几次试验后，能够通过自己的经验成功地学习到奖励的位置。因此，癫痫动物在观察学习方面表现出明显的缺陷。这一结果可能具有临床意义，特别是对于强烈依赖观察性学习的儿童。
