2008 Eighth Annual Beckman Scholars Symposium
Friday Poster Session - July 28, 2006

Recent research indicates that embryonic exposure to an antiepileptic compound called Valproic Acid (VPA) may provide a useful animal model of autism. Rats exposed to VPA in utero show a reduction in numbers of cerebellar Purkinje cells, overall cerebellar volume, and in cell numbers in cranial nerve motor nuclei. Our aim was to evaluate learning and memory in rats born to VPA-treated dams, and to ultimately correlate expected learning deficits with the brain abnormalities. The assessment of learning in “autistic” rats is currently being accomplished through four learning paradigms. The first of these learning paradigms is an instrumental appetitive-to-aversive transfer task which may depend on normal function in medial prefrontal cortex. The second learning paradigm involves aversive learning without prior appetitive experience, and serves as an essential control for the transfer task and as an assessment of a manipulation’s effects on simple aversive associative learning. The third paradigm is a spatial working memory task that presumably depends upon normal hippocampal and prefrontal function. Our fourth paradigm is an eyeblink-conditioning task, a task mediated in large part by cerebellar function. At this juncture, our results for the first and third tasks show that VPA-exposed rats display a significantly slower acquisition than controls to both paradigms. Through completing the second and fourth tasks, we will next begin to systematically characterize the cognitive consequences of autism by evaluating performance in this set of tasks.