Effects of chronic alcohol consumption or Diazepam administration on item recognition and temporal ordering in a spatial working memory task in mice

This study was aimed at determining the effects of either Diazepam administration or chronic alcohol consumption (CAC) on spatial memory measured by concurrent discriminations in an eight arm radial maze using mice as subjects. Two different protocols involving a non-matching rule were used to evaluate either temporal order (recurrent items) or item recognition (non-recurrent items). Results showed that both Diazepam administration and CAC produced a memory deficit which was primarily observed in the temporal task, whereas item recognition was spared. These data show that Diazepam and CAC produced similar memory impairments. Thus, our study stressed the potential importance of the GABA/BDZ dysfunction in the production of organic amnesia of alcoholic origin. The overall analysis of the data suggests that. both CAC and Diazepam injections would impair forms of memory sustained by automatic or incidental learning.