Evidence for impulsivity in the Spontaneously Hypertensive Rat drawn from complementary response-withholding tasks.docVIP

Behavioral and Brain Functions BioMedCentral Research Open Access Evidence for impulsivity in the Spontaneously Hypertensive Rat drawn from complementary response-withholding tasks Federico Sanabria* and Peter R Killeen* Address: Department of Psychology, Arizona State University, PO Box 871104 Tempe, AZ 85287-1104, USA Email: Federico Sanabria* - Federico.Sanabria@; Peter R Killeen* - killeen@ * Corresponding authors Published: 8 February 2008 Received: 27 September 2007 Accepted: 8 February 2008 Behavioral and Brain Functions 2008, 4:7 doi:10.1186/1744-9081-4-7 This article is available from: /content/4/1/7 ? 2008 Sanabria and Killeen; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: The inability to inhibit reinforced responses is a defining feature of ADHD associated with impulsivity. The Spontaneously Hypertensive Rat (SHR) has been extolled as an animal model of ADHD, but there is no clear experimental evidence of inhibition deficits in SHR. Attempts to demonstrate these deficits may have suffered from methodological and analytical limitations. Methods: We provide a rationale for using two complementary response-withholding tasks to doubly dissociate impulsivity from motivational and motor processes. In the lever-holding task (LHT), continual lever depression was required for a minimum interval. Under a differential reinforcement of low rates schedule (DRL), a minimum interval was required between lever presses. Both tasks were studied using SHR and two normotensive control strains, Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) and Long Evans (LE), over an overlapping range of intervals (1 – 5 s for LHT and 5 – 60 s for DRL). Lever-holding and DRL perfor