Life Sciences Commons^™

Investigating Sex Differences In Cognitive Deficits Resulting From 24-Hour Water Deprivation, Ivanka Rainer

Lewis Honors College Capstone Collection

Dehydration can negatively affect cognitive ability. Females, however,may be protected from impairments in cognitive performance associated with dehydration due to the influence estrogens have on fluid balance and cognition. Previous work in our lab demonstrated that water deprivation impaired performance in a novel object recognition task in females during times of low, but not high,estrogen levels, suggesting that estrogens protect memory recall during dehydration. However, rats in this experiment were only dehydrated in the testing phase. Whether dehydration during training impairs task performance is unclear.We, therefore, tested the hypothesis that dehydration during training impairs performance in a recognition task, but …