Spatial delayed nonmatching-to-sample performances in long-living Ames dwarf mice

- Long-living Ames dwarf mice and normal mice were compared on a spatial delayed nonmatching-to-sample task.
- Ames dwarf mice made more errors than normal mice.
- The Prop-1 mutation in Ames dwarf mice has surprising and inconsistent effects on learning and memory.

Ames dwarf mice have an extended lifespan by comparison with normal mice. Behavioral testing has revealed that sometimes Ames dwarf mice also evince superior performances relative to normal mice, but in other cases they do not. In this experiment, Ames dwarf and normal mice were compared on a T-maze test and on a delayed nonmatching-to-sample variant of a T-maze test. On the simple T-maze, Ames dwarf and normal mice committed comparable numbers of errors. On the nonmatching-to-sample task, normal mice mastered the discrimination by the end of the experiment while Ames dwarf mice did not. The apparatus, distances traveled and session duration were equivalent between the two tasks. The poorer performances of Ames dwarf mice on the nonmatching-to-sample task suggests that Ames dwarf mice may not be as capable of learning relatively cognitively complex tasks as normal mice.