Age-Related Differences in Impulsivity Among Adolescent and Adult Sprague-Dawley Rats

Adolescence is an ontogenetic period characterized by numerous hormonal, neural, and behavioral changes. In animal models, adolescents exhibit greater levels of novelty-seeking behavior and risk-taking relative to adults, behaviors associated in humans with increases in impulsivity and elevated prop...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behavioral neuroscience 2012-10, Vol.126 (5), p.735-741
Main Authors: DOREMUS-FITZWATER, Tamara L, BARRETO, Michelle, SPEAR, Linda P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age Differences
Age Factors
Animal
Animal behavior
Animal Sex Differences
Animals
Behavior, Animal - physiology
Behavioral psychophysiology
Biological and medical sciences
Delay Discounting
Experiments
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Impulsive Behavior - physiopathology
Impulsiveness
Male
Maturation
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Rats
Rats, Sprague-Dawley
Reward
Risk-Taking
Rodents
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Adolescence is an ontogenetic period characterized by numerous hormonal, neural, and behavioral changes. In animal models, adolescents exhibit greater levels of novelty-seeking behavior and risk-taking relative to adults, behaviors associated in humans with increases in impulsivity and elevated propensities to engage in drug and alcohol seeking behaviors. The current series of experiments sought to explore possible age-related differences in impulsivity when indexed using delay discounting in adolescent (postnatal day [P] 25-27) and adult (P68-71) female (Experiment 1) and male (Experiment 2) Sprague-Dawley rats. In both experiments, adolescents exhibited significantly greater levels of impulsive-like behavior in this test relative to adults-even when data were adjusted to account for baseline differences in activity levels (i.e., general nose-poking behavior) across age. Taken together, these results extend to both sexes previous findings of adolescent-associated elevations in impulsivity observed among male mice using delay discounting, as well as among male rats using other procedures to index impulsivity. That these age differences were observed among both male and female rats suggests that impulsivity may be a pervasive feature of adolescence, and contributes to the expression of risky behaviors during this ontogenetic period.
ISSN:0735-7044
1939-0084
DOI:10.1037/a0029697