Differential role of the hippocampus in response-outcome and context-outcome learning: evidence from selective satiation procedures

Instrumental performance in rats with hippocampal lesions is insensitive to the degradation of action-outcome contingencies, but sensitive to the effects of selective devaluation by satiation. One interpretation of this dissociation is that damage to the hippocampus impairs the formation of context-outcome associations upon which the effect of contingency degradation, but not selective satiation, relies. Here, we provide a direct assessment of this interpretation, and showed that conditioned responding to contexts did not show sensitivity to selective satiation (Experiment 1), and confirmed that instrumental performance was sensitive to selective satiation (Experiment 2) following hippocampal cell loss.