Generalization in place learning across geometrically different environments is impaired by hippocampal lesions in rats |
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Authors: | Tommasi Luca Save Etienne |
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Affiliation: | Facoltà di Psicologia, Università di Chieti, Via dei Vestini, I-66013 Chieti, Italy. luca.tommasi@unich.it |
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Abstract: | A recent study (Tommasi & Thinus-Blanc, 2004) found that when rats trained to search for food hidden in the center of a square-shaped enclosure were tested in the absence of food, they searched precisely in the center of the enclosure. Transfer tests carried out in enclosures differing in shape or size (rectangular-, large square-, and equilateral triangle-shaped) showed that rats searched in the geometric center of the novel environments. In the present work, half of those rats were lesioned bilaterally to the hippocampus and were then re-trained and re-tested in the same task, to be compared to sham rats that received the same retraining/re-test protocol. Results show that lesioned rats, although unimpaired in relearning to localize the center of the square-shaped enclosure, performed considerably worse than sham rats in the transfer tests in the enclosures differing in shape, suggesting a relevant role of the hippocampus in geometry-driven place generalization. |
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