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Volume 17, Number 21, Issue of November 1, 1997 pp. 8536-8549
Copyright ©1997 Society for Neuroscience

Rhinal Cortex Removal Produces Amnesia for Preoperatively Learned Discrimination Problems But Fails to Disrupt Postoperative Acquisition and Retention in Rhesus Monkeys

Received June 3, 1997; revised Aug. 13, 1997; accepted Aug. 15, 1997.

Jennifer A. Thornton^{1, 2}, Lawrence A. Rothblat², and Elisabeth A. Murray¹

¹ Laboratory of Neuropsychology, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, and ² Department of Psychology, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052

To test whether the rhinal cortex (i.e., entorhinal and perirhinal cortex) plays a time-limited role in information storage, eight rhesus monkeys were trained to criterion on two sets of 60 object discrimination problems, one set at each of two different time periods separated by 15 weeks. After the monkeys had learned both sets, two groups balanced for preoperative acquisition rates were formed. One group received bilateral ablation of the rhinal cortex (n = 4), and the other was retained as an unoperated control group (n = 4). After a 2 week rest period, monkeys were assessed for retention of the object discrimination problems. Retention was significantly poorer in monkeys with removals of the rhinal cortex relative to the controls (68 vs 91%). Although both groups showed slightly better retention of problems from the more recently learned set, there was no evidence of a differential effect of the cortical removal across sets (i.e., no temporal gradient). In addition, the monkeys with rhinal cortex lesions subsequently learned three new sets of 10 object discrimination problems as quickly as the controls did, thus ruling out the possibility of a gross impairment in visual perception or discrimination abilities. Furthermore, they retained these postoperatively learned object discriminations as well as the controls did. The findings indicate that the rhinal cortex is critical for the storage and/or retrieval of object discrimination problems that were learned up to 16 weeks before rhinal cortex ablation; however, in the absence of the rhinal cortex, efficient learning and retention of new discrimination problems can still occur.

Key words: visual discrimination; stimulus memory; retrograde amnesia; entorhinal cortex; perirhinal cortex; rhesus monkey

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