Effects of 12 hours sleep deprivation on task-switching in rats
-
1
Al-Helal Hospital, Netherlands
Performance of tasks dependent on prefrontal cortex activity appears to be particularly sensitive to loss of sleep. Data from our group show that insomniacs are impaired on a switch-task that strongly involves prefrontal activity. To enable research into the neurobiological mechanisms underlying this effect, we developed a switch-task for rats, and investigated the effect of 12h of sleep deprivation on task performance.
Male Wistar rats, on a diet of 15g/day and on a reversed light-dark cycle were daily trained at dark onset to perform 2 different discrimination tasks separately (eg. light -> left lever rewarded and tone -> right lever rewarded). The tasks were gradually integrated within sessions, creating a conditional discrimination task offered in blocks of 5-10 trials of one type.
Rats were sleep deprived for 12h by mild forced locomotion during the light phase, efficiently reducing slow-wave-sleep to 1,4% of control days. In the control condition (same rats, different days), the same amount of locomotion was spread out over a 23h period, so rats had sufficient time to sleep.
After 38 training sessions, 86,2% of switch-trials were correctly performed, while 99,0% of 5th trials were performed correctly. The 5th trials were chosen for comparison as all blocks consisted of at least 5 trials. The error-rate switch-costs were calculated per session per rat as the percentage of incorrect switch-trials minus the percentage of incorrect 5th trials.
Error rate switch costs increased in the first cohort of rats from 12,4% to 21,0% after 12h of sleep deprivation compared to movement control. On the basis of these preliminary data our tentative conclusion is that 12h of sleep deprivation increases switch-costs and that we can use this set-up to study the neurobiological basis of the effects of sleep deprivation on task-switching. Conclusive data will be available when the second cohort will also have been tested after sleep deprivation.
Conference:
41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting, Rhodes Island, Greece, 13 Sep - 18 Sep, 2009.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Poster presentations
Citation:
Leenaars
C,
Sandberg
H,
Zwart
A,
Ruimschotel
E,
Joosten
R,
Van-Someren
E and
Feenstra
M
(2009). Effects of 12 hours sleep deprivation on task-switching in rats.
Conference Abstract:
41st European Brain and Behaviour Society Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.08.2009.09.215
Copyright:
The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers.
They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters.
The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated.
Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed.
For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions.
Received:
11 Jun 2009;
Published Online:
11 Jun 2009.
*
Correspondence:
Matthijs Feenstra, Al-Helal Hospital, Cairo, Netherlands, m.feenstra@nin.knaw.nl