Incubation of a passive avoidance response after frontal lesions in the rat

Abstract

Rats with lesions of prefrontal cortex were compared with sham operates and cortical controls on a one-trial stepdown passive-avoidance task. At training-test intervals of 5 sec, 10 sec, or 24 h, one-trial learning effects were observed. All groups showed an incubation effect, i.e., stepdown latencies increased after longer retest intervals. There were no differences between animals with prefrontal lesions and the sham controls, suggesting that frontais have normal short-term timing behavior.