Abstract
This experiment was designed to determine the effects of hippocampal lesions on place and cue learning. Hippocampectomized and control rats were each divided into place and cue learning groups. Food deprived rats were trained in a cross-shaped maze for five days by the correction method. Four different types of behavior were noted: Correct response; Error I (rats entered wrong goals and returned); Error II (rats approached the entrance areas of goals and returned); and Error III (rats returned on the alley to goals). For cue learning, there were generally no differences between hippocampals and controls. In place learning, hippocampals were inferior to controls except in Error III. Here, Error I decreased gradually whereas Error II increased as the training progressed, so the total number of errors didn't change. Hippocampals only in place learning showed inflexibility in consecutive alley choices, indicating an inability to apply an appropriate place learning strategy to this problem. These results suggest that hippocampals show some deficiency in place learning but none in cue learning and they support the spatial cognition hypothesis for the hippocampus.
