Neurotoxic lesions of the rat perirhinal and postrhinal cortices and their impact on biconditional visual discrimination tasks

It has been argued that damage to the perirhinal cortex should impair visual discriminations when the stimuli have overlapping features. In Experiment 1, rats with perirhinal cortex lesions were trained on a series of visual discriminations in a water tank, culminating in a biconditional discriminat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Behavioural brain research Vol. 176; no. 2; pp. 274 - 283
Main Authors:	Davies, Moira, Machin, Penny E., Sanderson, David J., Pearce, John M., Aggleton, John P.
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	Shannon Elsevier B.V 25-01-2007 Elsevier Science
Subjects:	Animals Behavior, Animal Behavioral psychophysiology Biological and medical sciences Cerebral Cortex - injuries Cerebral Cortex - physiology Configural learning Discrimination Learning - drug effects Discrimination Learning - physiology Excitatory Amino Acid Agonists - toxicity Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology Male N-Methylaspartate - toxicity Parahippocampal cortices Perirhinal cortex Photic Stimulation Postrhinal cortex Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry Psychology. Psychophysiology Rat Rats Visual discrimination learning Visual Perception - drug effects Visual Perception - physiology Postrhinal cortex Visual discrimination learning Perirhinal cortex Rat Parahippocampal cortices Configural learning Rodentia Central nervous system Discrimination task Encephalon Learning Vertebrata Neurotoxicity Mammalia Discrimination Acquisition process Animal Vision Perception Lesion Visual task
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Summary:	It has been argued that damage to the perirhinal cortex should impair visual discriminations when the stimuli have overlapping features. In Experiment 1, rats with perirhinal cortex lesions were trained on a series of visual discriminations in a water tank, culminating in a biconditional discrimination. No evidence was found of a perirhinal lesion deficit, although the same rats showed an object recognition deficit. In Experiment 2 the lesions were extended to involve both the perirhinal and postrhinal cortices in a new group of rats. An impairment was now found on acquisition of the biconditional task, but this was not specific as impairments were also found on two elemental visual discriminations. Taken together, the study failed to find evidence that the rat perirhinal cortex is necessary for configural visual discriminations and so revealed that some ambiguous visual discriminations can be learnt when this area is removed. Furthermore, there was no evidence that the parahippocampal region is selectively dedicated to configural learning, even though the loss of this area can impair the acquisition of some configural tasks.
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0166-4328 1872-7549
DOI:	10.1016/j.bbr.2006.10.005