Artificial Thirst, Serum Na, and Behavioral Implications in the Hooded Rat

作者：Matthew J. Wayner, B. Wetrus, DAVID L. BLANK · 发表于：Psychological Reports · 年份：1962 · DOI：10.2466/pr0.1962.11.3.667 · 被引用次数：13 · 研究领域：Neuroendocrine regulation and behavior、Stress Responses and Cortisol、Regulation of Appetite and Obesity

Effective manipulation of motivational variables in studies of behavior is becoming increasingly important in the adequate design of animal experiments. The usual or natural procedures employed to produce variations in thirst and thirst motivation by means of deprivation are rather limited and suffer from disadvantages such as associated hunger, long adaptation periods complicated by diurnal activity cycles, stress effects, debilitation, and inanition if prolonged. Another obvious and important disadvantage is the length of time required for the tissue deficit to accrue and manifest itself in a measurable way in the animal's behavior. During the past ten years a number of experimental techniques have been developed and standardized for producing thirst artificially, independent of water deprivation, and utilized to fractionate motivational variables in learning. All of these techniques are based upon the fact that thirst is correlated under most conditions with an increase in extracellular osmotic pressure (Wdf, 1958) and that hypothalamic osmoreceptors are involved in its central mediation. Thirst can be produced, therefore, by increasing the extracellular osmotic pressure (Gilrnan, 1937; Holrnes & Gregersen, 1950; Adolph, Barker, Pc Hoy, 1954) or by dehydrating the hypothalamus directly (Andersson, 1953). Two common procedures used with large laboratory mammals are intravenous or intrahypothalamic injections of hypertonic saline. In the rat because of its small size, even i...