Short- and Long-Term Effects of Methylphenidate on Cost-Benefit Decision Making in Adult Rats

Decision making is one of the most complicated and controversial topics in neuroscience. Today, there are important classes of chemicals that increase cognitive performance; in particular these are psychostimulants (e.g., methylphenidate, MPH). However, the long-term effects of MPH on cost-benefit d...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Neurophysiology (New York) 2017-02, Vol.49 (1), p.53-58
Main Authors: Daniali, S., Manaheji, H., Nazemian, V., Taheri, M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Cognitive ability
Cost benefit analysis
Data processing
Decision making
Economic aspects
Information processing
Long-term effects
Methylphenidate
Nervous system
Neurobiology
Neurosciences
Reinforcement
Rodents
Stimulants
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Summary:Decision making is one of the most complicated and controversial topics in neuroscience. Today, there are important classes of chemicals that increase cognitive performance; in particular these are psychostimulants (e.g., methylphenidate, MPH). However, the long-term effects of MPH on cost-benefit decision making in healthy animals remain unknown. Therefore, we aimed to compare the short- and long-term effects of MPH in adult healthy male rats on the decision making in two distinct T-maze tasks and the ability of the animals to adjust the height of the obstacle in a T-maze or to process information on the reward amount. We found that short-term effects of MPH (2 weeks) played a significant role in making the correct decision in T-maze tasks, while the respective effects of long-term administration (12 weeks) were much weaker. These data suggest that chronic application of MPH has short- but not long-term effects on cost-benefit decision making in healthy adult animals.
ISSN:0090-2977
1573-9007
DOI:10.1007/s11062-017-9629-7