Assessing the Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Nontraditional Students' Mental Health and Well-Being.

The current study sought to measure how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the mental health and well-being of college students, particularly nontraditional students. Participants (n = 321) completed a series of surveys assessing their level of depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, insomnia, and well-being. Participants also indicated their nontraditional student characteristics, level of resilience, and additional life stressors due to the pandemic. Statistical analyses found that participants reported higher levels of depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, and insomnia, with corresponding lower levels of well-being across all students, compared with prepandemic levels. Results showed that while nontraditional students indicated an increased number of life stressors during the pandemic compared with their traditional peers, nontraditional students also demonstrated higher levels of resilience. Nontraditional students appear to be more successful at managing stressful life events due to the increased resilience that comes with age and experience, which can better prepare them to persevere and overcome challenges.

Episodic-like memory in the rat.

A fundamental question in comparative cognition is whether animals remember unique, personal past experiences. It has long been argued that memories for specific events (referred to as episodic memory) are unique to humans. Recently, considerable evidence has accumulated to show that food-storing birds possess critical behavioral elements of episodic memory, referred to as episodic-like memory in acknowledgment of the fact that behavioral criteria do not assess subjective experiences. Here we show that rats have a detailed representation of remembered events and meet behavioral criteria for episodic-like memory. We provided rats with access to locations baited with distinctive (e.g., grape and raspberry) or nondistinctive (regular chow) flavors. Locations with a distinctive flavor replenished after a long but not a short delay, and locations with the nondistinctive flavor never replenished. One distinctive flavor was devalued after encoding its location by prefeeding that flavor (satiation) or by pairing it with lithium chloride (acquired taste aversion), while the other distinctive flavor was not devalued. The rats selectively decreased revisits to the devalued distinctive flavor but not to the nondevalued distinctive flavor. The present studies demonstrate that rats selectively encode the content of episodic-like memories.

Spatial memory in rats after 25 hours.

We investigated the time course of spatial-memory decay in rats using an eight-arm radial maze. It is well established that performance remains high with retention intervals as long as 4 hr, but declines to chance with a 24-hr retention interval (e.g., Beatty & Shavalia, 1980b). It is possible that 24 hr reflects a genuine retention limitation of rat spatial memory. Alternatively, it may be possible to identify factors that might support memory performance even after very long delays. The current experiment was conducted to test the above two hypotheses. We evaluated performance using two intertrial intervals (24 and 48 hr) and two retention intervals (1 and 25 hr). Increasing the intertrial interval produced an approximately constant increase in performance for both retention intervals. This improvement is consistent with a trial-spacing effect (i.e., the superiority of spaced over massed trials). Rat spatial memory apparently lasts at least 25 hr.

Discrimination of what, when, and where is not based on time of day.

Rats (n = 6) visited four baited locations (randomly chosen on each trial; study phase), one of which was randomly selected to provide chocolate. After short (1-h) or long (25-h) retention intervals (RIs), eight locations were available, and the four locations not available in the study phase provided food (test phase); the chocolate location also provided food after long RIs. More visits to the chocolate location occurred after long RIs than after short RIs. Next, chocolate was paired with LiCl during the long RI (i.e., after encoding the chocolate location). Fewer revisits to the chocolate location occurred after LiCl than in previous testing with the long RI. The rats demonstrated complete transfer when grape replaced chocolate after LiCl-chocolate pairing. The discrimination of what, when, and where could not be based on adopting different revisit strategies at different times of testing.

Spatial navigation on the radial maze with trial-unique intramaze cues and restricted extramaze cues.

We investigated the use of extramaze and intramaze cues on the eight-arm radial maze. The rats received daily training consisting of forced-choice visits to four baited arms, a retention interval, and the availability of all eight arms with baits available at arms that did not appear in the forced-choice phase. The radial maze was placed in a featureless octagonal enclosure to minimize the availability of extramaze cues. Intramaze cues were provided at the distal end of each arm by placing a small object in front of the food trough; unique objects were randomly sampled from a large pool of objects. The use of extramaze and intramaze cues was assessed by rotating the objects, after the retention interval, on occasional non-rewarded probes, thereby dissociating the location of extramaze and intramaze cues. The rats used extramaze rather than intramaze cues. Implications for spatial representations are discussed.