Neonatal alcohol impairs the context preexposure facilitation effect in juvenile rats: dose-response and post-training consolidation effects.

Alcohol exposure on postnatal days (PND) 4-9 in the rat adversely affects hippocampal anatomy and function and impairs performance on a variety of hippocampus-dependent tasks. Exposure during this developmental window reveals a linear relationship between alcohol dose and spatial learning impairment in the context preexposure facilitation effect (CPFE), a hippocampus-dependent variant of contextual fear conditioning. The purpose of the current report was to examine the effect of a range of alcohol doses administered during a narrower window, PND7-9, than previously reported (Experiment 1) and to begin to determine which memory processes involved in this task are impaired by developmental alcohol exposure (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, rats pups received a single day binge alcohol dose of either 2.75, 4.00, 5.25 g/kg/day or were sham-intubated (SI) from PND7-9. Conditioned freezing during the test day was evident in all dosing groups, except for Group 5.25 g, indicating no graded dose-related behavioral deficits with alcohol exposure limited to PND7-9. In Experiment 2, rat pups were exposed to the highest effective dose from Experiment 1 (5.25 g/kg/day) or were sham intubated over PND7-9. During training, rats remained in the conditioning context for 5-min following immediate shock delivery. During this test of post-shock freezing, both SI and alcohol-exposed rats given prior exposure to the conditioning context showed comparable freezing levels. Since alcohol-exposed rats showed normal post-shock freezing, deficits by these rats on the test day likely reflect a failure to consolidate or retrieve a context-shock association, rather than a deficit in hippocampal conjunctive processes (consolidation, pattern completion) that occur prior to shock on the training day. These findings illustrate the value of the CPFE for characterizing the separable memory processes that are impaired by neonatal alcohol exposure in this task.