Environment Enrichment Facilitates Long-Term Memory Consolidation through Behavioral Tagging

The behavioral tagging (BT) hypothesis provides crucial insights into the mechanism of long-term memory (LTM) consolidation. Novelty exposure in BT is a decisive step in activating the molecular machinery of memory formation. Several studies have validated BT using different neurobehavioral tasks; however, the novelty given in all studies is open field (OF) exploration. Environment enrichment (EE) is another key experimental paradigm to explore the fundamentals of brain functioning. Recently, several studies have highlighted the importance of EE in enhancing cognition, LTM, and synaptic plasticity. Hence, in the present study, we investigated the effects of different types of novelty on LTM consolidation and plasticity-related protein (PRP) synthesis using the BT phenomenon. Novel object recognition (NOR) was used as the learning task for rodents (male Wistar rats), while OF and EE were two types of novel experiences provided to the rodents. Our results indicated that EE exposure efficiently leads to LTM consolidation through the BT phenomenon. In addition, EE exposure significantly enhances protein kinase Mζ (PKMζ) synthesis in the hippocampus region of the rat brain. However, the OF exposure did not lead to significant PKMζ expression. Further, our results did not find alterations in BDNF expression after EE and OF exposure in the hippocampus. Hence, it is concluded that different types of novelty mediate the BT phenomenon up to the same extent at the behavioral level. However, the implications of different novelties may differ at molecular levels.