Septal lesions and reasoning performance in the rat.

Spatial problem solving in the rat following medial frontal lesions

“…We have previously shown, however, that the mere use of extramaze stimuli to guide behavior on the Maier 3-table spatial-integration task is not sufficient to allow animals to perform successfully. Merely feeding the animals on a table and then giving them a test trial does not produce successful performance (Herrmann, Bahr, Bremmer, & Ellen, 1982;Stahl & Ellen, 1974). Rather, for the animals to be able to perform successfully on the 3-table task, they require a prior exploratory experience over the entire complex of tables and runways.…”

“…Although the hippocampus has been the major brain structure implicated in the ability of animals to solve spatial problems (Morris, Garrud, & Rawlins, 1981;O'Keefe & Nadel, 1978), many studies have also implicated the hippocampal projection targets (such as the septum) in the performance of spatial tasks (Herrmann, Black, Anchel, & Ellen, 1978;Stahl & Ellen, 1974). Unfortunately, there have been very few reports of damage to hippocampal projection targets other than the septum.…”

Cognitive maps and the hippocampus

“…In short, this task would seem to be an excellent representative of those problem situations in which Copyright 1980 Psychonomic Society, Inc. 168 performance depends on the existence of some kind of cognitive map. More importantly for the purposes of this workshop, performance on this task has been particularly sensitive to the effects of lesions of either the septal area (Stahl & Ellen, 1973), fornix (Herrman, Black, Anchel, & Ellen, 1978), or hippocampus (Rabe & Haddad, 1969). These findings are of particular importance in view of the recent emphasis (O'Keefe & Nadel, 1978) on the role of the hippocampus as the neural substrate of cognitive mapping.…”

“…This finding is not what might be expected from a distal cue hypothesis and very clearly implicates the role of cognitive mapping. Similarly, the work of Maier (1932b) and Stahl and Ellen (1973), using blinded rats or running rats in a darkened room, demonstrated that performance on the three-table task was unimpaired provided the animals had had the prior exploratory experience. Again, the distal cue hypothesis suffers.…”

Response suppression and facilitation by aversive stimuli following septal lesions in rats: A review and model

“…Dickinson (1973) found that if a successive go/no-go discrimination, in which septal damage had been shown to produce persistence , was converted into a succ~ssivg o/go discjimi na ti o n with the same st~muh and reinforcement schedules, operated anunals performed at least as efficiently as controls. Perhaps t~e strongest evidence that septal damage does not result m any general learning deficit comes from the similarity of acquisition functions of septal and intact rats in a variety of complex mazes (Thomas , Moore, Harvey, & Hunt, 1959;Ain, Lubar , Moon, & Kulig, 1969) although it should be noted that a deficit in a complex reasoning task has been reported (Stahl & Ellen, 1973). Finally in the rat, at least, septal lesions produce little detectable change in a range of species-specific behavior (Slotnick, 1967;Lubar, Herrman, Moore, & Shouse, 1973) .…”