Previous examinations of the long-term effects of alcohol exposure on omission-contingency learning have produced mixed results across different age or sex groups, with evidence for faster learning or no effect. However, none of these experiments made comparisons using the same exposure-dose across the age/sex groups. Here, we exposed rats to 6 weeks of alcohol injections (3 days/week, 1.75 or 3.5 g/kg/24-h, i.p. broken up into 2 injections/day) in adolescent/early adult males or females (PND27-66) or adult males (PND62-101). We then tested the rats in autoshaping and omission-contingency tasks. In contrast to our hypotheses, the low 1.75-g/kg/24-h dose led to slower omission learning and the higher 3.5-g/kg/24-h dose had no effect. There were no age- or sex-differences in omission learning. Additionally, during autoshaping training, rats exposed in adolescence/early adulthood had a faster shift to sign-tracking in their sign-tracking/goal-tracking ratios than rats exposed in adulthood, with no consistent effect of alcohol exposure or sex-differences. Our results suggest complex effects of alcohol on the neural substrates of omission-contingency learning at different doses, which will require future investigation.

先前对酒精暴露对遗漏-应变学习的长期影响的研究在不同年龄或性别组中产生了不同的结果，有证据表明学习速度更快或没有影响。然而，这些实验都没有对不同年龄/性别组使用相同的暴露剂量进行比较。在这里，我们在青少年/早期成年雄性或雌性 (PND27-66) 中将大鼠暴露于 6 周酒精注射（3 天/周，1.75 或 3.5 g/kg/24-h，ip 分为 2 次注射/天）或成年男性（PND62-101）。然后我们在自动整形和遗漏应急任务中测试了老鼠。与我们的假设相反，1.75-g/kg/24-h 的低剂量导致更慢遗漏学习和更高的 3.5-g/kg/24-h 剂量没有影响。遗漏学习没有年龄或性别差异。此外，在自动整形训练期间，在青春期/成年早期暴露的大鼠比在成年期暴露的大鼠在其符号跟踪/目标跟踪比率上更快地转向符号跟踪，没有酒精暴露或性别差异的一致影响。我们的研究结果表明，酒精对不同剂量的遗漏-应变学习的神经基质有复杂的影响，这将需要未来的研究。