Drug addiction and the hippocampus.
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to H B Eichenbaum.
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To determine whether discrete components of amygdaloid and striatal memory systems could interact to guide behavior in a radial arm maze, conditioned cue preference (CCP) and win-stay accuracy were examined after lidocaine inactivation of either the rostral (rBLA) or caudal (cBLA) basolateral amygdala, the lateral (lDST) or medial (mDST) dorsal striatum, or a control site in rats. CCP expression was blocked only after rBLA or cBLA inactivation. lDST inactivation prevented attainment of criteria win-stay performance, whereas rBLA and mDST inactivation delayed it. Control site inactivation did not influence performance in either task. These findings suggest that the amygdala works independently of other memory systems to regulate learned responses in the CCP task, the rBLA may work cooperatively with the lDST to guide behavior in the win-stay task, and the mDST is less critical than the lDST for attaining criteria performance in the win-stay task.
Learning complex relationships among items and representing them flexibly have been shown to be highly similar in function and structure to conscious forms of learning. However, it is unclear whether conscious learning is essential for the exhibition of flexibility in learning. Successful performance on the transitive inference task requires representational flexibility. Participants learned four overlapping premise pairs (A > B, B > C, C > D, D > E) that could be encoded separately or as a sequential hierarchy (A > B > C > D > E). Some participants (informed) were told prior to training that the task required an inference made from premise pairs. Other participants (uninformed) were told simply that they were to learn a series of pairs by trial and error. Testing consisted of unreinforced trials that included the non-adjacent pair, B versus D, to assess capacity for transitive inference. Not surprisingly, those in the informed condition outperformed those in the uninformed condition. After completion of training and testing, uninformed participants were given a postexperimental questionnaire to assess awareness of the task structure. In contrast with expectations, successful performance on the transitive inference task for uninformed participants does not depend on or correlate with postexperimental awareness. The present results suggest that relational learning tasks do not necessarily require conscious processes.
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