Estrogen and learning: Strategy over parsimony
- Department of Psychology, Center for Collaborative Neuroscience, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
In the current issue of Learning & Memory, McElroy and Korol (2005) present novel findings with respect to estrogen and learning, indicating how fluctuating levels of estrogen might alter strategies that rats use in order to obtain rewards. Specifically, they show that female rats with enhanced but nonetheless physiological levels of estrogen prefer strategies that capitalize on visual cues in space to find a reward, whereas those with low levels of estrogen prefer strategies that capitalize on behavioral responses that were effective previously and thus led to the reward. Importantly, for all manipulations, there was no real effect on learning per se but rather just a change in the type of strategy that a given rat used. In addition, McElroy and Korol (2005) were able to manipulate these preferences by altering the level of synaptic inhibition in the hippocampus, and in fact could make an animal that used one …
