Research Article The Effects of Sex and Chronic Restraint on Instrumental Learning in Rats

Copyright © 2013 Angela L. McDowell et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Chronic stress has been shown to impact learning, but studies have been sparse or nonexistent examining sex or task differences.We examined the effects of sex and chronic stress on instrumental learning in adult rats. Rats were tested in an aversive paradigm with or without prior appetitive experience, and daily body weight data was collected as an index of stress. Relative to control animals, reduced body weight was maintained across the stress period for males (−7%