Odor discrimination performance as affected by cortical, thalamic and cerebellar lesions in rats

Abstract

Blinded rats previously trained on an odor (tap water vs acetone) discrimination sustained bilateral parietal, cingulate, cerebellar, thalamic or olfactory bulb lesions and were subsequently tested for retention. Only the olfactory bulbectomized group showed significant deficits in retention. It is concluded that the parietal cortex, cingulate cortex, cerebellum, anterior thalamus, ventrolateral thalamus and ventromedial thalamus, rather than being included within a neural system concerned with the guidance of learned responses in nonvisual space, are components of the somatosensory system concerned with the performance of habits having a kinesthetic basis. Of some importance was the additional finding that the learning process underlying the tap water acetone problem may not be fundamentally different from that underlying a brightness discrimination problem.