title: Hippocampal involvement in the acquisition of relational associations, but not in the expression of a transitive inference task in mice.
abstract: The hippocampus (HC) has been suggested to play a role in transitive inference (TI) on an ordered sequence of stimuli. However, it has remained unclear whether HC is involved in the expression of TI, or rather contributes to TI through its role in the acquisition of the sequence of elements (Frank, Rudy, & O'Reilly, 2003). Presently, the authors compared the effects of excitotoxic dorsal HC lesions in C57BL mice that received surgery before or after they were trained to discriminate between pairs of visual stimuli. Performance on a subsequent TI task was worse in mice with pretraining lesions than in those with posttraining lesions, which showed similar performance to shams without lesions. This indicates that HC is not involved in the expression of TI, but may merely help to acquire the underlying representations required for TI.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Biological Psychology, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
authors.forename: Ann
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Van der Jeugd
authors.forename: Hannelore
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Goddyn
authors.forename: Annelies
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Laeremans
authors.forename: Lutgarde
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Arckens
authors.forename: Rudi
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: D'Hooge
authors.forename: Tom
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Verguts
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001364:Awareness; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000293:injuries / Q000502:physiology*; D018782:Maze Learning; D051379:Mice; D008810:Mice, Inbred C57BL; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D012691:Serial Learning / Q000502:physiology*