Early social deprivation disrupts attentional, but not affective, shifts in rats

This study examined the effects of early social deprivation in rats on 2 dissociable forms of inhibitory control of behavior that operate at 2 different levels of response selection: reversing the assignment of stimulus-reward associations within perceptual dimensions (affective shifts) and switching selective attention from 1 perceptual dimension to another (attentional shifts). Isolated subjects (isolates) and social controls (socials) were individually trained to spatial and nonspatial visual discrimination criteria on a radial arm maze. Whereas isolates and socials differed in neither acquisition nor reversal of both versions of the task, isolates were selectively impaired in shifting from spatial to nonspatial discrimination and vice versa. These findings demonstrate that isolation rearing selectively disrupts inhibitory control in attentional selection but leaves inhibitory control in affective processing intact.