S. Burton et al., Combined lesions of hippocampus and subiculum do not produce deficits in anonspatial social olfactory memory task, J NEUROSC, 20(14), 2000, pp. 5468-5475
Rats transmit information to each other about which foods are safe to eat.
If a rat smells a food odor on the breath of another rat, it is subsequentl
y more likely to eat that food than an alternative. Work by Galef et al. (1
988) has shown that the observer rat forms an association between two olfac
tory stimuli on the breath of the demonstrator rat that has eaten the food,
the food odor and carbon disulphide, which is normally present in the rat
breath. Bunsey and Eichenbaum (1995) claimed that the hippocampus/subicular
region is required for the long-term retention of this nonspatial form of
associative memory on the basis that combined lesions of the hippocampus an
d subiculum produced a deficit, but lesions of either structure alone did n
ot. We report here a failure to repeat this finding. Rats with either combi
ned lesions of the hippocampus and subiculum or with amygdala lesions were
tested on their ability to remember this association either immediately (te
sting short-term memory) or after a 24 hr delay (testing long-term memory).
Neither lesion group exhibited significant memory deficits on this nonspat
ial associative task at either test interval. In contrast, a deficit was ob
served on a spatial memory task (forced-choice alternation t-maze) for anim
als with combined lesions of the hippocampus and subiculum. These results c
ontradict the findings of Bunsey and Eichenbaum (1995) and support the idea
that the hippocampus/subicular region is not required for this nonspatial
associative memory.