Alleviation of infantile amnesia in rats by means of a pharmacological contextual state.

Although a number of studies have demonstrated that the relatively rapid rate of forgetting in young rats (i.e., infantile amnesia) can be alleviated by various reminder treatments, the possibility of enhancing retention by other procedures seems largely unexplored. Given the putative importance of contextual cues as sources of memory retrieval, this experiment examined whether the presence of a distinctive pharmacological state at training and testing could override infantile amnesia. Weanling rats were given pentobarbital or saline prior to Pavlovian fear-conditioning. When tested 1 week later, subjects in the same-state drug condition showed better retention than the same-state saline group. This finding extends previous work on memory recovery in young animals by demonstrating alleviation of infantile amnesia without a re-exposure to the CS or UCS during the retention interval.