Effects of Hippocampal Lesion on Pontine Recording IN Latent Inhibition

Kwaack, So-Young; 곽소영; Kim, Ki-Suk; 김기석; Kim, Hyun-Taek; 김현택

Abstract

This study was conducted to examine the role of hippocampus in nictitating membrane response in rabbits. Especially, the latent inhibition procedure was used to differenciate between the stage of stimulus(conditioned stimulus:CS) processing and that of association. As the pontine nuclei was the recording sites, it was possible to observe the effects of hippocampus on conditioned stimulus before the information of the CS enters cerebellum. The result was that the multi-unit neural activity in pontine necleus was influenced by hippocampal damage. That is, compared to the normal animals, the hippocampal lesion anmals consistently kept up more neural responses to the repeated CS. However, they showed no difference in the manner in which the multi-unit activity progresses during the course of time. These results indicate indirectly that hippocampus is related to processing and interpreting incoming stimuli. It is considered that hippocampal lesion animals show no retardation of learning in latent inhibition because they response redundantly to irrelavant stimuli. This study is insufficient to conclude that the computational procedure in hippocampus is concerned with attention. Yet, it is reasonable to attribute the cause which the hippocampal lesion animals differ from normal animals in latent inhibition to CS-related function of hippocampus. Therefore the role of hippocampus in classical conditioning is related to CS processing rather than association itself.

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Article Contents

Vol.5

Effects of Hippocampal Lesion on Pontine Recording IN Latent Inhibition

Abstract

The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology