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The Journal of Neuroscience, December 1, 1998, 18(23):10045-10052

Neurotoxic Lesions of the Dorsomedial Thalamus Impair the Acquisition But Not the Performance of Delayed Matching to Place by Rats: a Deficit in Shifting Response Rules

Peter R. Hunt¹ and John P. Aggleton²

¹ Medical Research Council Cambridge Centre for Brain Repair, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 2PY, United Kingdom, and ² School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, CF1 3YG, United Kingdom

This study examined the acquisition of a T-maze matching to place task by rats with neurotoxic lesions of the thalamic nucleus medialis dorsalis. This test of spatial working memory also entails learning a task rule that is contrary to the animals' innate preference. The rats next performed the same matching task over different retention delays. Finally, they were trained on a reversal of the task rule, i.e., to nonmatch to place. Although the lesions produced a clear acquisition impairment on the matching task, there was no evidence of a loss of working memory. A series of control tasks found no appreciable effect on a conditioned cue preference task or on open field activity. The pattern of results shows that medialis dorsalis lesions lead to a selective increase in perseverative behavior that can retard task acquisition. This perseverative deficit closely resembles that observed after prefrontal damage in rats, strongly indicating dysfunction in a common system.

Key words: medial dorsal thalamus; matching to place; response rules; working memory; spatial memory; prefrontal cortex; amnesia

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Copyright © 1998 Society for Neuroscience  0270-6474/98/182310045-08$05.00/0

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