Impairment of shock avoidance learning after long-term alcohol ingestion in mice.

Chronic alcohol consumption impaired the learning of a two-way shuttle box avoidance task in mice 10 to 14 days after the discontinuation of ethanol in the diet. Control groups received laboratory chow ad libitum or were pair-fed with the alcohol-consuming mice by diets containing isocaloric amounts of sucrose. The performance of the two control groups was indistinguishable from each other, and only the ethanol-consuming mice performed poorly. It was therefore concluded that alcohol consumption per se and not a nutritional deficiency was responsible for the impairment of learning.