Perirhinal cortex lesions impair feature-negative discrimination

The role of the perirhinal cortex in inhibitory eyeblink conditioning was examined. In Experiment 1, rats were given lesions of the perithinal cortex or control surgery and subsequently trained with a feature-negative discrimination procedure followed by summation and retardation tests for conditioned inhibition. Perithinal cortex lesions impaired, but did not prevent acquisition of feature-negative discrimination. Results from the summation test showed that rats with perirhinal cortex lesions could not generalize feature-negative discrimination to a new stimulus. There were no group differences during the retardation test. Experiment 2 showed that lesions of the perithinal cortex did not impair simple excitatory conditioning. Experiment 3 showed that perithinal cortex lesions had no effect on acquisition of a simple tone-light discrimination. The results suggest that the perirhinal cortex plays a role in eyeblink conditioning when using discrimination procedures involving overlapping stimuli. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.