When a sodium deficit is induced in rats without lesions, they increase their saline intake regardless of prior experience. By contrast, this experiment found that rats with lateral hypothalamic lesions increased their saline intake only when they had had preoperative experience ingesting saline in response to a sodium deficit. Rats were given natriuretic and mineralocorticoid treatments to induce sodium appetite. The role of preoperative experience in neural function are discussed.Many brain lesion studies use animals that are naive with regard to the test challenge, and on the basis of the animal's response to the test, inferences are made about the role of particular brain structures in the behavior. A more "dynamic" approach was used by Benjamin (1959). In his study, groups of rats with cortical ablations were given various degrees of preoperative experience in a taste discrimination test. The results showed that the more preoperative experience with this test, the less likely there would be a taste discrimination deficit; rats that were not given this preoperative experience did show this deficit.Similarly, recent studies on diencephalic lesions indicate that if one exposes rats to an experimental test prior to induction of the lesion, the rats when tested postoperatively respond appropriately to the test whereas rats not given the preoperative experience do not (
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