Increased maternal care rescues altered reinstatement responding following moderate prenatal alcohol exposure.

BACKGROUND Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) commonly includes deficits in learning, memory and executive control that can have a severe negative impact on quality of life across the lifespan. It is still unclear how prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) affects executive control processes, such as control over reward seeking, that lead to inappropriate behavior later in life. Learning and reinstatement of a previously learned response after extinction is a simple, well validated, measure of both acquisition of a rewarded instrumental response, and sensitivity to reward and reward-associated cues. We investigated the effects of PAE on learning, extinction and reinstatement of a simple instrumental response for food reward. Next, we assessed the effectiveness of an early intervention, communal nest (CN) housing, on increased reinstatement of an extinguished response seen after PAE. METHODS To assess the effects of PAE on control over reward seeking, we tested male and female PAE and saccharine (SAC) controls raised in a standard nest (SN) on the acquisition, extinction, and food reward induced reinstatement of an instrumental response utilizing a touch-screen based paradigm. Next, in order to examine the effects of an early life intervention on these behaviors, we tested PAE and SAC mice raised in a communal nest (CN) early life environment on these behaviors. RESULTS PAE mice readily acquired and extinguished a simple touch response to a white square stimulus. However, PAE mice showed significantly increased and persistent reinstatement compared to controls. Increased maternal care via rearing in CN slowed acquisition and sped extinction learning, and rescued the significantly increased reinstatement responding in PAE mice. CONCLUSIONS Together these results demonstrate that even moderate PAE is sufficient to alter control over reward seeking as measured by reinstatement. Importantly, an early life intervention previously shown to improve cognitive outcomes in PAE mice was sufficient to ameliorate this effect. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.