Working memory impairment in a transgenic amyloid precursor protein TgCRND8 mouse model of Alzheimer's disease

The most profound deficits observed in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are in domains of episodic and working memory systems. Transgenic (Tg) mice expressing mutated human amyloid precursor protein (APP) genes offer a model to study the effect of AD pathology on cognition. We reported previously that APP TgCRND8 mice showed deficits in a reference and working memory evaluated in a Morris water-maze test. In this study, we evaluated the working memory of TgCRND8 mice comparing two training paradigms in a six-arm radial water maze. In the first paradigm, the exploration of the maze was constrained, forcing the mice to use a spatial mapping strategy. In the second paradigm, mice were unconstrained in their exploration of the maze. TgCRND8 mice proved to be significantly impaired in spatial working memory in both paradigms as compared with their non-transgenic littermates. The analysis of data revealed that forcing mice to use a spatial strategy during training caused only a moderate improvement in the performance of all mice. However, unconstrained exploration of the maze not only resulted in a fast learning in control mice, but also facilitated the development of a chaining strategy in spatially impaired TgCRND8 mice. In conclusion, TgCRND8 mice showed impairment in spatial working memory but retained a plasticity to choose alternative search strategies.