Environmental Enrichment, Performance, and Brain Injury in Male and Female Rats
Abstract
Environmental enrichment affects the performance of intact organisms and improves recovery from brain injury. The extent to which physical vs. social aspects of enriched environments separately contribute to superior performance, or the extent to which males and females differ in their response to enrichment has not been examined previously. The goals of this doctoral research were to examine the separate and combined effects of social enrichment (SE) and physical enrichment (PE) on the cognitive performance of neurologically intact and brain-injured rats and to determine if there are gender differences in these effects. Measures of basic (i.e., locomotor habituation and ASR/PPI) and complex cognitive processing (i.e., passive avoidance, Morris water maze) were used to determine if enrichment affected performance on simple and complex cognitive measures. Experiment I examined the effects of enrichment on the performance of 192 intact animals. Experiment II examined the effect of enrichment on the performance of 96 injured animals. The major findings from the study were as follows: (1) social enrichment has the greatest effect on improving performance in both intact and injured animals; (2) the effects of enrichment overall generally appear to be greater for males than for females; and (3) overall enrichment has the greatest beneficial effect on tasks that require the active processing of information. These findings replicate and extend previous work on enrichment and may have important implications for educational programming and brain injury rehabilitation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2004
- Accession Number
- ADA435418
Entities
People
- Brenda M. Elliott
Organizations
- Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences