The purpose of this experiment was to compare the problem-solving performance of rats allowed to explore either one or two tables of Maier's three-table-problem apparatus on successive days. The feeding &xperience and test trial were administered on the day after all tables and runways had been explored in this piecemeal fashion. No rat that explored only one table and runway per day was able to solve the problem, whereas 60% of the rats that explored two tables and their interconnecting runways did solve the problem. All rats that explored the entire apparatus on each exploratory day were able to solve the problem. These data support the notion that animals can conceptually link objects experienced successively into cognitive representations which specify the constant relationships existing between those objects. The existence of such an absolute spatial mechanism makes it unnecessary for an organism to depend upon relative spatial mechanisms such as routes or cues.In recent years the concept of a cognitive map has become a major theoretical construct in theories of spatial cognition. Although first introduced by Tolman (1948), the cognitive map concept received its most sophisticated treatment by O' Keefe and Nadel (1978), inasmuch as they elaborated a number of major properties of cognitive maps. Specifically, cognitive maps were differentiated from systems that relied on extant cues and orientations in the guidance of behavior. For example, a cognitive map allows an animal to react to stimuli that are not immediately present (i.e., act at a distance). Additionally, it is an information structure in which the distance and direction between various environmental objects are specified. Another property of a cognitive map is that it allows organisms "to link together conceptually parts of an environment which have never been experienced at the same time" (O'Keefe & Nadel, 1978, p. 2). It is to this latter property of a cognitive map that this paper is addressed.Inasmuch as organisms acquire information about a region by virtue of exploratory activity (O'Keefe & Nadel, 1978) and inasmuch as this process involves a series of successive experiences, such information must be transformed into a cognitive structure in which the distance and direction between the various successively experienced objects are indicated before it can be used in the solving of problems such as the A version of this paper was presented at the Seventy-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Atlanta, GA, March 3I-April 2, 1983, and at the Sixtieth Annual Meeting of the Georgia Academy of Science, April 22-23, 1983. The patience of Martha Turner and Majella Hardie in the typing of various versions of this manuscript is appreciated. The authors' mailing address is: Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, University Plaza, Atlanta, GA 30303.taking of the shortest route to food, etc. Spatial information results when various objects in a cognitive representation exist as a simultaneous pattern rat...
A within-subjects investigation was conducted to determine the effects of central versus peripheral cholinergic blockade in animals tested either on a spatial integration task in which the possibility of rule learning was also available or on a visual discrimination task in which the daily location of food was marked by a distinctive visual stimulus pattern. All testing was conducted on the Maier three-table apparatus. It was found that the only effect of the peripheral cholinergic blockade on the performance of either task group was to produce a decrease in exploratory behavior. In contrast, central cholinergic blockade markedly impaired spatial integration performance; however, it did not impair the ability of animals in rule learning or visual discrimination learning. It was also found that central cholinergic blockade impaired the animal's tendency to enter all tables before reentering a given table during the exploratory phase of the daily session. This finding was interpreted as reflecting an impairment of working memory for spatial information, rather than a general impairment in working memory, and this interpretation was applied to the explanation of the deficit in the spatial integration performance.
An attempt was made to ameliorate the deficit in performance shown by septal rats on the Maier three-table task by using either a distinctive visual stimulus insert as a discriminative cue to the route to the daily locus of the food table (Experiment 1) or distinctive visual inserts merely to mark the spatiallocation of each table and the runway leading to that table from the choice point (Experiment 2). When a single stimulus insert consistently identified the food table and the runway to it, regardless of its location in the room, then septals did not differ from shams, and both septals and shams performed better than comparable animals not given the exploratory experience. When the stimulus inserts merely identified the spatiallocation of each table and its corresponding runway, then septals still were impaired relative to normals. More importantly, the fact that normals could perform successfully in Experiment 2 only when they had received a prior exploratory experience indicated that highlighting the spatial location of each table and its runway with a distinctive intramaze stimulus marker does not alter the qualitative character of the three-table task as one requiring spatial integration.A number of neurobehavioral studies (Ellen & Weston, 1983;Herrmann, Black, Anchel, & Ellen, 1978;Herrmann, Black, Doherty, & Ellen, 1980;Rabe & Haddad, 1969;Stahl & Ellen, 1973, 1979 have shown that damage to the septal-hippocampal complex and its interconnections produces profound and long-lasting deficits in performance on the Maier three-table task (Maier, 1932). It will be recalled that on this task animals are required to integrate information concerning the spatial relations existing among the three tables with information concerning the daily locus of food. Each day, the start and food tables are changed so that the animals never learn a particular route to the food or a particular location ofthe food.Despite the marked successes that have been achieved with operant tasks in the attenuation of septal-lesioninduced deficits by means of an external cue that indicates when to respond (Braggio & Ellen, 1976;Ellen & Butter, 1969;Kelsey & Grossman, 1971), a comparable improvement in performance has not been achieved when an external cue is used to signal the locus of the food table in the three-table task. Herrmann et al. (1980) have shown that when a cue light was placed on the feeding table during both the feeding experience and the test trial, septal animals were still unable to return directly to the food table on the test trial.It should be noted that, in the three-table task, the use of the cue light to signal the bai ted table isThe contributions of the following people to the various parts of this study are gratefully acknowledged: Martha Blanc, John CuJlom, Cynthia Johnson, Salvador Macias, and Betty Soteres. The authors' mailing address is: Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, University Plaza, Atlanta, GA 30303.133 not comparable to that of the operant task. In the operant chamber, the cue light...
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