ArticlesCumulative vs. Acute Dose–Response Procedures Produce Differential BAC and Behavioral Functions for Ethanol
Section snippets
Subjects
Twelve male Sprague–Dawley rats weighing 300–325 g were purchased from Sasco Laboratories, Inc. (Omaha, NE). Rats were housed individually in stainless steel suspended cages located in an American Association for Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care-accredited colony room under the direct supervision of the Department of Animal Resources of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. The animal colony room was maintained on a 12-h light-dark cycle (lights on 0530) at 20–22°C, with a
Results
ETOH stimulus control was established in all 12 rats with a mean number of sessions to criterion performance of 58 days (range 41–67 days). The initial multicycle tests of stimulus control by the two training stimuli provided clear evidence that each rat demonstrated differential response patterns that correlated perfectly with differential cycle-dependent injection patterns (data shown in Table 1). In all of these tests, each rat emitted less than 13 responses prior to the first reinforcer
Discussion
We have demonstrated shifts in ETOH discriminative stimulus generalization functions differentially generated by acute injection and cumulative dosing procedures. Tests conducted with the training dose of ETOH (1.25 g/kg) using an acute testing procedure always engendered a group mean percentage of ETOH-appropriate responding that met our training criteria (>90%), whereas both of the cumulative procedures used required a higher cumulative dose of ETOH in order to engender equivalent criterion
Acknowledgements
We express our appreciation to Ms. Lynn Montgomery for her excellent and professional administrative assistance. This project was supported by RO1-AA6351 and RO1-AA8338 to F. A. H. and D. V. G. and T-32-AA07222 to F. A. H.
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