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Nicotine Enhances Acquisition Of A T-Maze Visual Discrimination: Assessment Of Individual Differences, J. Besheer, Rick A. Bevins

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

In the present report, rats' performance was assessed in five tasks designed to measure behavioral response to different novel stimuli under different experimental situations. Daily nicotine treatment (0, 0.3 or l.0 mg/kg) began after the conclusion of the behavioral tasks and continued throughout the experiment. Training of a T-maze visual discrimination task commenced after 11 days of nicotine pretreatment. As a group, rats treated with the higher dose of nicotine (l.0 mg/kg) made fewer errors to acquire the initial T-maze discrimination than saline-treated controls. Activity induced by an inescapable novel environment (i.e. first behavioral screen) was positively correlated with the …