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Updated: Mar 19, 2026
A General Method for Evaluating Incubation of Sucrose Craving in Rats
Published on: November 4, 2011
Daily access to sucrose impairs aspects of spatial memory tasks reliant on pattern separation and neural
Amy C Reichelt1, Margaret J Morris2, Reginald Frederick Westbrook3
1School of Psychology, UNSW Australia, UNSW Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia amy.reichelt@rmit.edu.au.
Abstract:
High sugar diets reduce hippocampal neurogenesis, which is required for minimizing interference between memories, a process that involves "pattern separation." We provided rats with 2 h daily access to a sucrose solution for 28 d and assessed their performance on a spatial memory task. Sucrose consuming rats discriminated between objects in novel and familiar locations when there was a large spatial separation between the objects, but not when the separation was smaller. Neuroproliferation markers in the dentate gyrus of the sucrose-consuming rats were reduced relative to controls. Thus, sucrose consumption impaired aspects of spatial memory and reduced hippocampal neuroproliferation.
