Excess neonatal thyroxine: effects on learning in infant and adolescent rats

Previous reports have suggested that neonatal thyroxine administration may enhance learning ability in rats as infants but the rats become deficient in learning as they grow older. This experiment compared neonatally thyroxine-injected rats with injected and nonhanded controls on passive and active avoidance and a geotactic cold-escape discrimination. Thyroxine-injected infant rats were superior to controls on active avoidance, inferior on passive avoidance, and equal on discriminated escape. Adolescent rats which had received postnatal thyroxine were inferior to controls in Lashley III maze acquisition whether or not they had received supplementary thryoxine at the time of training. These data suggest that differences in locomotor activity, rather than in learning ability, account for early behavioral effects and that changes other than endocrine disturbances account for the adult deficits. The results are compatible with previous contentions that excess neonatal thyroxine disrupts the timing of brain development.