Immediate visual-spatial memory in hemisphere-damaged patients: impairment of verbal coding and of perceptual processing.
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Patients with unilateral frontal- or temporal-lobe excisions and normal control subjects were tested on the recall of objects and of their location in an array. An incidental-learning situation was used, in which the task was presented as a test of the ability to estimate the prices of the objects. Patients with right frontal-lobe lesions were the only group impaired on price estimation, but a correlation was obtained between error-score in price estimation and lesion-size for the left frontal-lobe group. In contrast to patients with extensive right hippocampal excisions, both frontal-lobe groups were accurate on location-recall when tested immediately and again 24 hr later.
To assess the role of the superior cervical ganglia in learning and memory processes, rats underwent ganglionectomy or sham procedures. No effect was found on acquisition, performance, or reversal of an appetitive spatial/memory task.
It was investigated in rats whether hippocampal long-term potentiation (LTP) influences working and/or reference memory processing in the radial maze. After preliminary training to an intermediate level of performance, experimental subjects received a series of high-frequency trains of electrical pulses applied to the right perforant path. Two control groups were adopted in order to control for possible effects of stimulation plus operation, and operation alone, respectively. Twenty-four hours after the experimental treatment, animals were administered one trial of radial maze training. This sequence of hippocampal stimulation and radial maze training was replicated 15 times. After a retention interval of 2 months, one radial maze trial was presented on each of 3 consecutive days. The analysis of field potential data showed that periodic LTP stimulation produced a state of hippocampal LTP confined to the initial portion of the acquisition phase. Evaluation of radial maze data revealed a marginal improvement of working memory performance in the experimental group during the rising phase of hippocampal LTP.
Old and young Fisher 344 rats were compared for their ability to learn a delayed alternation task. The old animals displayed significant impairment of alternation learning, and were slower than the young animals. The brains of these animals were examined using a silver degeneration stain, and among old rats there was conspicuous degeneration. The greatest density of degenerating fibers was seen in the hippocampus and in anatomically related tracts, but there was substantial fiber staining in the corpus callosum, anterior commissure, and internal capsule. Examination of the young brains revealed only an occasional fiber. There were no signs of cortical atrophy in the old animals. The histopathology of the aged animals' hippocampus and fiber tracts supports the possibility that the delayed alternation impairment shown by these animals was a result of age related degenerative changes.
Seventy-five aged rats were tested for a variety of motor and cognitive tests which generated 20 separate measures of performance. Considerable variability was observed on many measures in the aged population. Multivariate analyses were performed on the data to determine 1) the extent of intercorrelations between the measures for the aged rats, and 2) whether clusters of related and/or unrelated behavioral measures could be determined. Aged rats that were impaired on measures of cognitive performance are not necessarily impaired in their motor performance and vice versa. These results demonstrate that different age-related variables affect cognitive and motor systems, and suggest that age-related declines in different functional anatomical systems, such as the limbic system and the basal ganglia may progress independently.
Enriched environment has been shown to enhance learning and memory and to induce morphological changes in the hippocampus. We report that rats housed in an enriched environment showed improved performance in the Morris water maze and decreased spontaneous motor activity. Exposure to behavioural tests increased expression of the mRNA that encodes brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the hippocampus. This was not seen when rats subjected to impoverished housing were tested suggesting that environmental history of the animal is of importance to induce expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factor in the hippocampus that may promote neuronal changes related to learning and memory.
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The effects of aging and of housing in an enriched environment on performance in an 8-arm radial maze were evaluated in young adult (7-8 months) and old (30-33 months) male Brown-Norway rats, using a procedure in which the rats were confined for 8 s to the central platform of the maze between consecutive choices. Although the old rats attained a level of performance which was clearly above change, they were shown to perform worse than the young rats. No performance differences were found between differentially housed rats of the same age group. In a second experiment recovery cycles of visual evoked potentials were determined in the same rats by using paired flashes with an interstimulus time of 400, 300, 200, or 100 ms. Recovery was consistently smaller in the old rats as compared to the young ones. No correlation could be demonstrated, however, between radial maze performance or housing condition and recovery functions of the visual evoked potentials. This finding indicates that a decline in visual sensitivity cannot readily explain the impaired radial maze performance of old rats. Evidence which suggests that age-related hippocampal changes play a major role in the radial maze performance deficit is discussed.
Rats were trained to asymptotic performance in an 8-arm radial maze. They then received chronic intraventricular infusion of either artificial CSF or the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist D-2-amino-5- phosphonopentanoic acid (AP5), at a concentration (30 mM) that has been shown previously to prevent the induction of long-term potentiation in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus in vivo. Subsequently the rats received another 9 trials in the maze in a quasi-random order, 3 uninterrupted trials, and another 6 trials each with mid-trial delays of 5, 20 or 60 min during which the animals were placed in their home cage. The mean number of errors for the AP5 rats did not differ significantly from that of the controls in the uninterrupted trials throughout the experiment, nor did it differ from that of the controls in any of the 3 delayed trials when these were first introduced. However, the control animals performed better at the longer delays when these were introduced for the second time, whilst there was no such improvement (but rather a deterioration) for the AP5 animals. The impairment of performance in the AP5 rats during the second block of delayed trials was significant, and independent of the length of the delay. These results show that NMDA receptor blockade does not impair working memory in the radial maze per se, but that it does prevent an improvement of working memory persistence with further training.
Learning scores and degrees of divergence of the exploratory patterns (EP) displayed during the acquisition stage of a radial eight-arm maze task were examined in fornix-damaged and sham-operated rats injected either with oxotremorine (0.1 mg/kg) or saline. Modifications of hippocampal rhythmic slow activity (theta) recorded in each condition were analyzed in CA1 and dentate gyrus. Dorsal fornix sections reduced choice accuracy but also induced the adoption of weakly divergent EP. Oxotremorine in animals with lesions reinstates both learning scores and degree of divergence of EP at the levels respectively observed in saline sham-operated animals. Finally, oxotremorine in sham-operated animals did not significantly improve choice accuracy but strongly modified the EP. Preoperatively, theta rhythms indicated a decrease of frequency after oxotremorine administration. Postoperatively, they showed an increase of frequency in animals with lesions that were reinstated at the preoperative level by oxotremorine.
Animals previously trained to criterion on an eight-arm radial maze task received either bilateral 6-hydroxydopamine lesions of the dorsal noradrenergic bundle (DNB) or control surgery. Following a 3-week recovery period, the animals were trained on the same radial maze in two novel environments. By a within-subjects design, in one of these environments animals received posttraining systemic treatment with the opiate antagonist naloxone; in the other novel environment, they received vehicle injection. In animals that received control surgery, opiate antagonist treatment produced a reliable enhancement of performance. Although the DNB-lesion animals did not differ from the control-surgery animals under the saline treatment condition, denervation of forebrain norepinephrine (NE) was found to prevent the memory enhancing effect of posttraining naloxone administration. These results provide further support that enhanced retention obtained with opiate antagonist administration is dependent upon intact NE function.
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Young (mean age = 25.0) and elderly (mean age = 65.0) women's memory for buildings in a large model town was assessed. Participants viewed and constructed the town on two trials. Building distinctiveness was manipulated by showing differentiated buildings with unique physical and functional properties (e.g., school, gas station), or nondifferentiated buildings that were not functionally distinct and only somewhat physically distinct (e.g., red cube-like structure with curved roof, yellow cube-like structure with flat roof). Building distinctiveness was further manipulated by verbally labeling or not labeling each building type. On Trial 1 young adults were more accurate than elderly adults only on the differentiated buildings; on Trial 2 this age difference was evident on differentiated and nondifferentiated buildings. Verbal labeling did not significantly affect construction accuracy. It was concluded that age differences occurred because elderly adults have more difficulty utilizing encoding strategies than young adults.
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Five hungry pigeons first received delayed matching of key location training. Trials began with a "ready" stimulus (brief operation of the grain feeder). Then one (randomly chosen) of a set of four keys from a three-by-three matrix was lit briefly as the sample. After a short delay (retention interval), the sample key was lit again along with one of the other eight keys. A peck at the key that had served as the sample produced grain reinforcement, whereas a peck to the other key produced only the intertrial interval. After delayed matching of key location was learned, the remaining five key locations were introduced as samples. Four of the five birds performed at considerably above-chance levels on the novel sample trials during the first as well as subsequent sessions. These results suggest that pigeons sometimes learn the single rule-"choose the location that matches the sample." The relevance of these results to the issue of whether pigeons learn a generalized matching rule (i.e., a concept of "sameness") is discussed.