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Functionally Dissociating Aspects Of Event Memory: The Effects Of Combined Perirhinal And Postrhinal Cortex Lesions On Object And Place Memory In The Rat., T J Bussey, J L Muir, J P Aggleton

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Reciprocal interactions between the hippocampus and the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices form core components of a proposed temporal lobe memory system. For this reason, the involvement of the hippocampus in event memory is thought to depend on its connections with these cortical areas. Contrary to these predictions, we found that NMDA-induced lesions of the putative rat homologs of these cortical areas (perirhinal plus postrhinal cortices) did not impair performance on two allocentric spatial tasks highly sensitive to hippocampal dysfunction. Remarkably, for one of the tasks there was evidence of a facilitation of performance. The same cortical lesions did, however, disrupt …