title: Interaction of ventral and orbital prefrontal cortex with inferotemporal cortex in conditional visuomotor learning.
abstract: Five rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) were trained to learn novel conditional visuomotor associations, to perform this task with familiar stimuli, and to perform a visual matching-to-sample task with the same familiar stimuli. Removal of the orbital and ventral prefrontal cortex (PFv+o) in 1 hemisphere and inferotemporal cortex (IT) in the other, thus completing a surgical disconnection of these 2 regions, yielded an impairment on all 3 tasks. Addition of a premotor cortex lesion to the hemisphere containing the PFv+o lesion did not worsen the impairments. The results indicate that PFv+o interacts with IT in both the learning and retention of conditional visuomotor associations. In addition to those associations, which might be considered lower order rules for choosing a response, frontotemporal interaction also appears to be important for higher order rules, such as those involved in the matching task.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Neuropsychology, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-4415, USA. tjb1000@cam.ac.uk
authors.forename: Timothy J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Bussey
authors.forename: Steven P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Wise
authors.forename: Elisabeth A
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Murray
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D008253:Macaca mulatta / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D009048:Motor Skills; D017397:Prefrontal Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception