Effects of Memantine on Sign-Tracking

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Sign tracking is an organism approaching a signal for an appetitive stimulus. An example of this in humans is an addict interacting with drug paraphernalia when coming across it without consciously understanding why or knowingly intending to get high. This contributes to relapse and finding a pharmaceutical that reduces sign tracking could help addicts in recovery. We replicated this kind of signtracking in rats and administered three different doses of Memantine to test how this affects their signtracking. We first got the rats to associate a lever popping out with a treat pellet being given. We tracked how often the rats interreacted with the lever and food receptacle to determine if they are signtrackers (interact a lot with the lever) goal-trackers (interact a lot with the food receptacle) or Intermediate (Interacted with both).A mixed model ANOVA showed a significant interaction between dose and behavioral phenotype, but post hoc test showed no significant differences between pairs. These results are unusual but promising and more research is needed.