Selective breeding for endurance running capacity affects cognitive but not motor learning in rats.

The ability to utilize oxygen has been shown to affect a wide variety of physiological factors often considered beneficial for survival. As the ability to learn can be seen as one of the core factors of survival in mammals, we studied whether selective breeding for endurance running, an indication of aerobic capacity, also has an effect on learning. Rats selectively bred over 23 generations for their ability to perform forced treadmill running were trained in an appetitively motivated discrimination-reversal classical conditioning task, an alternating T-maze task followed by a rule change (from a shift-win to stay-win rule) and motor learning task.

Mismatch brain response to speech sound changes in rats.

Understanding speech is based on neural representations of individual speech sounds. In humans, such representations are capable of supporting an automatic and memory-based mechanism for auditory change detection, as reflected by the mismatch negativity (MMN) of event-related potentials. There are also findings of neural representations of speech sounds in animals, but it is not known whether these representations can support the change detection mechanism analogous to that underlying the MMN in humans.