The impairment of one-trial passive avoidance learning in chicks caused by prenatal aluminum exposure

✍ Scribed by Rui Xing; Zhaomin Zhong; Hongbing Ma; Yonghua Cui; Yanwen Zheng; Shiqing Xu; Yi Che

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 117 KB
• Volume: 54
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0012-1630
• DOI: 10.1002/dev.20589

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Prenatal aluminum exposure may affect the development of the embryo and alter the capacity for learning and memory in adults. The chick embryo is a good experimental model to study the effect of prenatal toxin exposure on cognitive defects in offspring, because it eliminates maternal confounding variables. In the present study, we applied a one‐trial passive avoidance‐learning task in day‐old chicks to examine the effects of prenatal aluminum chloride injections (2, 20, and 200 mM in 200 µl per egg, daily over a period of 4 successive days) on memory consolidation. The data suggest that chicks injected with aluminum chloride (20 mM) daily from E12 to E15 had significantly impaired short‐term memory, intermediate‐term memory, and long‐term memory (LTM) after training (p < .05) but chicks injected with aluminum chloride (2 mM) had impaired LTM only. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 54:133‐138, 2012.