DIFFERENTIAL OUTCOMES ATTENUATE MEMORY IMPAIRMENTS ON MATCHING-TO-POSITION FOLLOWING PYRITHIAMINE-INDUCED THIAMINE-DEFICIENCY IN RATS

Numerous studies have demonstrated that rats with pyrithiamine-induced thiamine deficiency (PTD) have extensive diencephalic damage and are severely impaired at acquiring new tasks that require the use of ''wor king memory.'' The differential outcomes (DO) procedure, which correla tes specific reinforcers with specific discriminative stimuli, improve s performance of normal subjects on various conditional discrimination tasks. The present study revealed that, relative to PTD rats' receivi ng uncorrelated reinforcers, implementing the DO procedure in the T-ma ze version of matching-to-position completely eliminated the PTD learn ing deficit. These results suggest that utilizing different informatio n processing systems in brain-damaged subjects may reduce their memory impairments.