Enhancement of short-term retention by appetitive-reinforcer reminder treatment

Choice accuracy by rats in a delayed-alternation paradigm was shown to decrease over a 120-sec retention interval. The decrement in choice accuracy was reversed by presentation of the appetitive reinforcer outside of the apparatus during the retention interval. This suggests that the reinforcer served to reactivate the target spatial memory and that the short-term retention deficit in the absence of such memory reactivation was not due to a loss of information. The results are discussed with respect to recent criticisms of memory-reactivation treatments in short-term retention tasks.