Fd. Rose et al., ENVIRONMENTAL ENRICHMENT FOLLOWING BRAIN-DAMAGE - AN AID TO RECOVERY OR COMPENSATION, Behavioural brain research, 56(1), 1993, pp. 93-100
Postoperative environmental enrichment (EC) in rats with brain lesions
has been hailed as a potential agent of recovery of function followin
g brain damage. However, most such claims are based on examining the e
ffects of EC on acquisition of a new task following brain injury. Else
where we have argued that since this paradigm fails to establish a pre
operative behavioural baseline against which to compare subsequent per
formance it may demonstrate compensation but cannot provide evidence o
f recovery. The present study directly addresses this issue by examini
ng the effects of postoperative EC both on performance of a preoperati
vely acquired water maze escape response as well as on de novo acquisi
tion of such a response in rats with bilateral occipital and sham lesi
ons. In terms of swim times postoperative EC was found to significantl
y improve the performance of subjects which had not been preoperativel
y trained but not the performance of those subjects which had. However
, in terms of a trials to criterion measure postoperative EC benefitte
d animals in both the preoperative and postoperative training conditio
ns. The results, therefore, support the view that what has been observ
ed in most previous studies is EC-induced compensation rather than rec
overy and also help to define the conditions under which this occurs.
However, they also argue for further investigation of the hypothesis t
hat postoperative EC may enhance recovery of lesion-impaired performan
ce consistency.