Cooling orbital frontal cortex disrupts matching-to-sample and visual discrimination learning in monkeys

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Matching-to-sample and visual discrimination performance was examined during cooling of the, orbital cortex in monkeys. Cooling produced severe deficits in simultaneous match-to-sample and delayed match-to-sample performance across all delays, 0–60 sec, and resulted in substantial difficulties in learning visual discriminations. Retention of discriminations learned during cooling of the orbital cortex was unaffected when tested under cooling or noncooling conditions. Discriminations learned prior to cooling were also not affected by orbital cooling. These results suggest that the orbital cortex is important in visual learning but not in retention, and are similar to findings on these tasks with anterior temporal lobe cooling.