Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Differential Effects And Rates Of Normal Aging In Cerebellum And Hippocampus, Diana S. Woodruff-Pak, Michael R. Foy, Garnik G. Akopian, Ka Hung Lee, Jordan Zach, Kim Phuong Thi Nguyen, David M. Comalli, John A. Kennard, Alexis Agelan, Richard F. Thompson

Psychological Science Faculty Works

Cognitive functions show many alternative outcomes and great individual variation during normal aging. We examined learning over the adult life span in CBA mice, along with morphological and electrophysiological substrates. Our aim was to compare cerebellum-dependent delay eyeblink classical conditioning and hippocampus-dependent contextual fear conditioning in the same animals using the same conditioned and unconditioned stimuli for eyeblink and fear conditioning. In a subset of the behaviorally tested mice, we used unbiased stereology to estimate the total number of Purkinje neurons in cerebellar cortex and pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus. Several forms of synaptic plasticity were assessed at different ages …