The imposition of, but not the propensity for, social subordination impairs exploratory behaviors and general cognitive abilities.

Imposed social subordination, such as that which accompanies physical defeat or alienation, has been associated with impaired cognitive function in both human and non-human animals. Here we examined whether domain-specific and/or domain-general learning abilities (c.f.

Longitudinal attentional engagement rescues mice from age-related cognitive declines and cognitive inflexibility.

Learning, attentional, and perseverative deficits are characteristic of cognitive aging. In this study, genetically diverse CD-1 mice underwent longitudinal training in a task asserted to tax working memory capacity and its dependence on selective attention. Beginning at 3 mo of age, animals were trained for 12 d to perform in a dual radial-arm maze task that required the mice to remember and operate on two sets of overlapping guidance (spatial) cues.

A dopaminergic gene cluster in the prefrontal cortex predicts performance indicative of general intelligence in genetically heterogeneous mice.

Background: Genetically heterogeneous mice express a trait that is qualitatively and psychometrically analogous to general intelligence in humans, and as in humans, this trait co-varies with the processing efficacy of working memory (including its dependence on selective attention). Dopamine signaling in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) has been established to play a critical role in animals' performance in both working memory and selective attention tasks. Owing to this role of the PFC in the regulation of working memory, here we compared PFC gene expression profiles of 60 genetically diverse CD-1 mice that exhibited a wide range of general learning abilities (i.