Current events

Date: Aug 05th

Time: 09:30 am

Place : 2nd Floor Conference Room, Gonda building.

Title : ""Intact Performance on Feature-Ambiguous Discriminations in Rats with Lesions of the Perirhinal Cortex ""

Speaker: Walter Babiec

Summary: clark et al., have developed a behavioral paradigm for the rat that makes it possible to separate the evaluation of memory functions from the evaluation of perceptual functions. Animals were given extensive training on an automated two-choice discrimination task and then maintained their memory performance at a high level while interpolated probe trials tested visual perceptual ability. The probe trials systematically varied the degree of feature ambiguity between the stimuli. As feature ambiguity increased, performance declined in an orderly, monotonic manner. Bilateral lesions of the perirhinal cortex fully spared the capacity to make feature-ambiguous discriminations and the performance of lesioned and intact animals was indistinguishable at every difficulty level. In contrast, the perirhinal lesions did impair recognition memory. The findings suggest that the perirhinal cortex is important for memory and not for perceptual functions.

Relevant Information:

http://www.cell.com/neuron/abstract/S0896-6273(11)00197-8?switch=standard