Research ReportAssessment of attention in male and female Brattleboro rats using a self-paced five-choice serial reaction time task

- Vasopressin's role in attention is investigated.
- Female Brattleboro rats may be more sensitive to vasopressin-deficiency than males for normal attention processing.
- Brattleboro rats require more learning sessions to acquire an operant task.

The Brattleboro rat is a mutant variation of the Long-Evans strain that exhibits negligible central nervous system levels of vasopressin, a neuropeptide that may influence behavioral and cognitive processes. Compared to Long-Evans rats, Brattleboro rats exhibit diminished fear conditioning and have impairments in spatial memory and sensory gating. The present study sought to further evaluate the cognitive profile of vasopressin-deficient rats by studying attention in male and female Brattleboro and heterozygous rats using a self-paced version of the five-choice serial reaction time task. Male Brattleboro rats required significantly more sessions to meet the training criteria than those by heterozygotic and Long-Evans (wild type) rats. Female Brattleboro rats displayed significantly poorer attention accuracy compared to heterozygotic and Long-Evans rats. Taken together, the present findings add further evidence that vasopressin deficiency diminishes cognitive functioning.