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| Poster #175 The Impact of Innocuous Taste Experience on Long-term Taste Learning and Memory Persistence |
| Dallas Shuman, Marie Yarbrough, Veronica Flores Furman University, Greenville, SC, United States |
Both humans and animals learn to reliably avoid or seek foods based on experience. For example, through associative learning, animals learn to avoid tastes that have been previously paired with negative consequences. In a laboratory setting, this is known as conditioned taste aversion (CTA). Recently, we have shown that CTA learning can be enhanced when prefaced with benign taste experiences – a phenomenon we have called Latent Enhancement of CTA learning (LE). For example, taste experience with sour and salty tastes (TE) enhances CTA to novel sucrose 24 hours later (Flores 2016, 2018). Here, we investigate the long term behavioral and neural impacts of LE by testing aversions 24 hours, one week and two weeks post aversion learning in female long evans rats (n=30). We hypothesized that rats who had TE would better retain their aversion at 1 week and 2 weeks post CTA than rats with water experience. Thus far we have replicated the LE phenomenon and demonstrate that animals who received TE, show quicker extinction of CTA learning at the one week test point and stronger retention at the two-week time point. These results suggest different consolidation mechanisms occuring after TE. To better correlate behavior with neural activity, we use immunohistochemistry to tag cells with cFOS and Npas4 (immediate early gene proteins known to be involved in synaptic plasticity and neural activity) in gustatory cortex and the basolateral amygdala after learning. Thus far, the strength of CTA learning correlates with both activity and plasticity measures in both regions. Together these results provide deeper understanding into the LE phenomenon and give insight into how previous taste experiences alter future taste processing and learning. |