The Journal of Neuroscience, July 15, 2000, 20(14):5468-5475
Combined Lesions of Hippocampus and Subiculum Do Not Produce
Deficits in a Nonspatial Social Olfactory Memory Task
Stephen
Burton,
David
Murphy,
Uzma
Qureshi,
Patrick
Sutton, and
John
O'Keefe
Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, University College
London, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom
Rats transmit information to each other about which foods are safe
to eat. If a rat smells a food odor on the breath of another rat, it is
subsequently more likely to eat that food than an alternative. Work by
Galef et al. (1988) has shown that the observer rat forms an
association between two olfactory stimuli on the breath of the
demonstrator rat that has eaten the food, the food odor and carbon
disulphide, which is normally present in the rat breath. Bunsey and
Eichenbaum (1995) claimed that the hippocampus/subicular region is
required for the long-term retention of this nonspatial form of
associative memory on the basis that combined lesions of the
hippocampus and subiculum produced a deficit, but lesions of either
structure alone did not. We report here a failure to repeat this
finding. Rats with either combined lesions of the hippocampus and
subiculum or with amygdala lesions were tested on their ability to
remember this association either immediately (testing short-term
memory) or after a 24 hr delay (testing long-term memory). Neither
lesion group exhibited significant memory deficits on this nonspatial
associative task at either test interval. In contrast, a deficit was
observed on a spatial memory task (forced-choice alternation t-maze)
for animals with combined lesions of the hippocampus and subiculum.
These results contradict the findings of Bunsey and Eichenbaum (1995)
and support the idea that the hippocampus/subicular region is not
required for this nonspatial associative memory.
Key words:
memory; social transmission; food preference; hippocampus; subiculum; amygdala; nonspatial
Copyright © 2000 Society for Neuroscience 0270-6474/00/20145468-08$05.00/0
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