Fig. 1

Gestational diabetes mellitus induces atypically exploratory and inattentive behavior and impairs recognition memory in offspring. Behavioral test analysis of 14- to 15-week-old rats. a, b Open field heat map demonstrates that GDM offspring on postnatal HFS diet stayed more in the center of the field. ^# p < 0.05, compared to lean LF cohorts, n = 8–10. c–e GDM offspring also showed reduced rearing, but their moving activity was not different from the lean offspring cohorts. f, g In NOR, GDM offspring failed to differentiate the familiar object from the novel object presented to them a day after the training, while lean offspring spent significantly more time exploring the novel object on test day.*p < 0.05, n = 6–10