The acquisition of conditional discriminations in baboons following temporal and frontal lesions

Abstract

Baboons with bilateral inferotemporal lesions or with more extensive temporal lobe lesions learned a size-color conditional problem as easily as the normal controls, and more easily than those with dorsolateral frontal lesions. Despite the use of training techniques designed to equalize the initial learning scores of all the animals, the temporal operates were significantly impaired on the acquisition of the size discrimination. However, the finding that they were able to use this newly acquired visual information in the more complex conditional learning situation does not indicate a general inability to form stimulus-response associations with visual information. On the contrary, the results suggest that the principal difficulty of animals with temporal lesions is related to the initial perceptual analysis of the discrimination. If they are given sufficient experience with certain visual material, this acquired information is available for use in more complex visual learning situations. This experiment therefore provides another demonstration of the fact that despite a severe impairment on classical pattern discriminations, animals with inferotemporal lesions are able to learn certain visual problems.