Physiological characterization of instrumental learning in the spinal cord using the Paw Withdrawal Learning paradigm

Following spinal cord injury (SCI), sensory and motor functions are severely disrupted yet the spinal circuitry below the injury site continues to maintain active and functional neuronal properties (Edgerton, 2004). The spinal cord is endogenously capable of several forms of adaptive plasticity, including functional re-training with exercise, instrumental, and Pavlovian learning. The paw withdrawal learning (PaWL) paradigm represents a simple spinal instrumental learning model (Jindrich 2019). Briefly, in mice whose spinal cords are completely transected (ST) at mid-thoracic (T7-T9) level, the tibialis anterior (TA) muscle is given a sub maximal threshold shock to a hind leg when the leg is extended below a 1mm imposed threshold from a baseline starting position. The contingent group mice learn to maintain the shocked leg, in a flexed position while the experimentally coupled noncontingent group of mice do not acquire the flexed position. To demonstrate the acquisition of the flexed paw hold is mediated through muscle-specific proprioceptive inputs and a time dependent modification of the spinal interneuronal network associated with the TA motor pool, we measured the TA muscle activity using acute EMG during PaWL in both Contingent stim and non-contingent stim groups. To demonstrate that TA specific sensory afferents are critical in PaWL, we blocked the proprioceptive muscle and the cutaneous afferents using Lidocaine. During PaWL, the TA muscle showed significant EMG activity when compared to medial gastrocnemius and vastus lateralis muscles. We detected greater TA muscle activity in the Contingent stim compared to the non-contingent groups. The significant increase in the EMG amplitude in the TA muscle and time-frequency and power relationships in the contingent group, but not the non-contingent group, suggests that the successful learning requires a temporal engagement of the spinal sensorimotor network. CSULA Mini-Grant 2020 and Joseph/Gomez-Pinilla R01NS056413 (Diversity Supplement) This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2023 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.