Neurorehabilitation and neural repair
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Neurorehabil Neural Repair · Jul 2011
Temporal effects of environmental enrichment-mediated functional improvement after experimental traumatic brain injury in rats.
Environmental enrichment (EE) enhances motor and cognitive performance after traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, whether the EE-mediated benefits are time dependent and task specific is unclear. A preliminary study, in which only half of the possible temporal manipulations were evaluated, revealed that the beneficial effects of enrichment were only observed when provided concurrently with specific training (ie, motor or cognitive), suggesting task-specific dependence. ⋯ These data support the conclusion from the previous study that EE-mediated functional improvement after TBI is contingent on task-specific neurobehavioral experience and extends those preliminary findings by demonstrating that the duration of enriched exposure is also important for functional recovery.