EXCITOTOXIC LESIONS OF THE AMYGDALA FAIL TO PRODUCE IMPAIRMENT IN VISUAL LEARNING FOR AUDITORY SECONDARY REINFORCEMENT BUT INTERFERE WITH REINFORCER DEVALUATION EFFECTS IN RHESUS-MONKEYS

Aspiration lesions of the amygdala were found previously to produce a severe impairment in visual discrimination learning for auditory secon dary reinforcement in rhesus monkeys (Gaffan and Harrison, 1987), To d etermine whether excitotoxic amygdala lesions would also produce this effect, we trained four naive rhesus monkeys on the same task, The mon keys were required to learn 40 new visual discrimination problems per session in a situation in which visual choices were guided by an audit ory secondary reinforcer that had been previously associated with food reward. Bilateral excitotoxic lesions of the amygdala had no effect o n the rate of learning visual discrimination problems for auditory sec ondary reinforcement. We also tested the amygdalectomized monkeys on a reinforcer devaluation task and compared their performance with a gro up of three normal monkeys. The monkeys first learned to discriminate 60 pairs of objects, baited with two different food rewards. Each of t he food rewards was then devalued by selective satiation in two separa te experimental sessions, Normal controls tended to avoid displacing o bjects that covered the devalued food to a significantly greater degre e than did the amygdalectomized monkeys, indicating that the excitotox ic amygdala damage interfered with reinforcer devaluation effects, Our results are consistent with the idea that the amygdala is necessary f or learning the association between stimuli and the value of particula r food rewards; however, the amygdala is not necessary for maintaining the value of secondary reinforcers, once they have been learned.