THE EFFECT OF SOCIAL-LEARNING ON A CONDITIONED AVOIDANCE-RESPONSE OF RATS TREATED PRENATALLY WITH ALUMINUM LACTATE

Aluminum (Al) has been proven to be a behavioral teratogenic agent in a number of experimental studies. Prenatal exposures to Al lactate hav e been shown to cause cognitive deficits in a variety of species. The present experiment was carried out on SPRD rat pups treated prenatally with Al lactate to determine whether observational conditioning (soci al learning) would reverse the impairment in learning described previo usly following such treatment. A conditioned avoidance response was us ed as an observational learning task. The results provide evidence tha t Al-treated pups are capable of social learning (i.e., the performanc e of the avoidance response improved as a result of observational lear ning); however, the response latency of the avoidance response was not different in these animals from those that were not exposed to such f acilitation, suggesting that additional factors are involved in the ef fects of prenatal aluminum intoxication on cognitive processes. (C) 19 97 Elsevier Science Inc.