Preservation of cognitive flexibility through social and environmental enrichment

Johns Hall 208

Attentional Set-Shifting Task, also known as AST, is used to assess cognitive flexibility in animal models to understand higher order executive functioning. Subjects were 27 Long Evans rats—19 of which were aged (25 months old) that were either socially housed (9) or non-socially housed (10) in enriched housing conditions, and 8 served as young controls (6 months old) that were housed individually in standard shoebox cages. We hypothesized that the aged rats living in a social and enriched environment will perform better on the cognitive flexibility task than aged rats living in enriched isolation. Rats were presented with different perceptual discriminations that featured 2 dimensions. Each discrimination required the rat to cognitively pair a dimension with a reward, while ignoring the irrelevant dimension still present during the task. The last discrimination task required the rats to ignore the previous cognitive pair and learn a new one, which ultimately tested cognitive flexibility. There were no significant differences among the housing conditions or age on AST. The near perfect performances of the aged rats could be due to prior testing experience and possible neural protective benefits from the enriched environment that the aged rats lived in.