Delayed response in blind cats before and after prefrontal ablation

Abstract

Eleven cats were blinded by bilateral section of the optic nerve and trained on delayed response (DR) after 70 days' postoperative recovery. Six learned DR as well as normal cats; the remaining 5 animals either did not learn to approach the correct feeder, signalled by a continuous auditory cue, or failed to maintain correct approach behavior when a brief delay intervened between stimulus offset and response. Comparable failures were not observed in intact cats. The blind cats which met criterion on 30 sec delay were subjected to the bilateral ablation of the proreal and anterior orbital gyri. They showed the same deficits in postoperative retention of DR as sighted cats with these cortical lesions. This experiment demonstrates [1] that vision is necessary for immediate or delayed auditory localization by some cats, and [2] that prefrontal decortication has an equivalent effect on DR retention by cats that learned DR with or without vision.