Short- and Long-Term Effects of Methylphenidate on Cost-Benefit Decision Making in Adult Rats

Decision making is one of the most complicated and controversial topics in neuroscience. Today, there are important classes of chemicals that increase cognitive performance; in particular these are psychostimulants (e.g., methylphenidate, MPH). However, the long-term effects of MPH on cost-benefit decision making in healthy animals remain unknown. Therefore, we aimed to compare the short- and long-term effects of MPH in adult healthy male rats on the decision making in two distinct T-maze tasks and the ability of the animals to adjust the height of the obstacle in a T-maze or to process information on the reward amount. We found that short-term effects of MPH (2 weeks) played a significant role in making the correct decision in T-maze tasks, while the respective effects of long-term administration (12 weeks) were much weaker. These data suggest that chronic application of MPH has short- but not long-term effects on cost-benefit decision making in healthy adult animals.